As more and more people awaken to the threats against our basic rights online, we must start a debate - everywhere - about the web we want.

The Web took off in all its glory because it was a royalty-free infrastructure . . . When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going to end in the U.S.A. If we had a situation in which the U.S. had serious flaws in its Net Neutrality, and Europe did have Net Neutrality, and I were trying to start a company, then I would be very tempted to move.

It was the academic community who wired up their universities so it was put together by smart, well-meaning people who thought it was a good idea.

If you use the original World Wide Web program, you never see a URL or have to deal with HTML. That was a surprise to me - that people were prepared to painstakingly write HTML.

Universality has been the key enabler of innovation on the Web and will continue to be so in the future.

The story of the growth of the World Wide Web can be measured by the number of Web pages that are published and the number of links between pages. The Web's ability to allow people to forge links is why we refer to it as an abstract information space, rather than simply a network.

In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it.