Do we like Tim Berners-Lee?
Our score: 9 out of 10. He gave the web away free, has kept pushing for a safer, fairer internet for years, and we found no harmful words or acts of his own.
Tim Berners-Lee was born in London in 1955, studied physics at Oxford, and went on to work at the European physics lab CERN. In 1989 he proposed the information system that became the World Wide Web, and the first website went up in December 1990. He later founded the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT to look after the web's standards.
The defining decision of his life was a generous one. He has said he felt the web could only work if anyone could use it freely, and that he couldn't also ask people to pay for each search and upload. He persuaded CERN to put the underlying technology in the public domain, which is why you didn't need a licence to build a website. Plenty of people in his spot would have cashed in.
There's no big scandal here, which is its own kind of answer. We found no lawsuit against him and no accusations of misconduct. The one courtroom appearance on record is a 2012 patent fight in Texas, where he took the stand as a witness for the defendants, the first time he had testified in court, according to the Benton Institute.
The recent news is more of the same. At SXSW London in June 2026 he told AFP that AI should keep the web's original values, that people should be able to control their own data, and that AI would benefit from regulation. He pointed out that AI has no standards body like the W3C. Where you land on his data-wallet ideas is a tech debate, but the instinct is protecting individuals from big platforms.