Take a roll call of the founders of the Web, and you鈥檒l find Robert Cailliau near the top. 鈥淩obert who?鈥� you may ask, as Cailliau, an informatics specialist at CERN, is unknown. His role has been eclipsed by Tim Berners-Lee, his former colleague at the particle physics lab near Geneva where the Web took root. But that鈥檚 about to change when Cailliau鈥檚 book, How the Web was Born, is published next month. He may be the Web鈥檚 quiet man, but Cailliau has strong views about its future. He thinks Web users need a 鈥渟urfing licence鈥�, and should pay to download pages. Joanna Marchant went to CERN to hear his story.
How did you and Tim Berners-Lee come to invent the World Wide Web?
We independently wrote proposals for using hypertexts to link CERN鈥檚 documentation. Tim鈥檚 proposal was quite a few steps ahead because he envisaged using the Internet as an infrastructure within which documents would be linked. When I heard of his proposal, we got together, and in 1990, co-wrote a first proposal to management which was labelled 鈥淭he World Wide Web鈥�.
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Does it bother you that Tim gets all the recognition?
Not at all. I think he deserves that recognition. He has always pushed for the Web to remain an open and accessible system. He doesn鈥檛 really care about boundaries. He is much more concerned with getting correct information out, making it findable, building trust between people, than anything else. As far as I know him, he also does not particularly appreciate some of the limelight. But if you want to point to one person, he is the one who deserves the credit.
Have you ever sought recognition for the contribution that you made?
Actively sought, no. I did always try to present a balanced view.
You and Tim did a lot of work together on getting the Web started. Why didn鈥檛 you write a book about the Web together?
Ah. I would have liked that to happen a long time ago. We looked for a writer who would be able to represent the view from outside. But at that time enthusiasm was very low鈥� Finally James Gillies, CERN鈥檚 science writer, and I decided to do it ourselves, at the risk of appearing biased because of my personal involvement. The book, How the Web was Born, is mostly James鈥檚 work. He was not involved in the creation, so he was able to do the research independently. I played the role of consultant, really.
British Telecom seems to think it got to the Web first. The company recently announced it intends to prosecute a patent it holds on hyperlinks. Why didn鈥檛 you patent parts of the World Wide Web?
The computer is not a machine like anything we have built before. It is not a physical object, something that you plug in and run like your kettle. The computer is a machine for simulating physical machines. It goes lightning-fast, and computer networks allow you to make copies of digitally stored information at virtually no cost because there is no physical effort involved. These characteristics have not existed in any previous technology. It means that all our old ideas break down: copyright, patents, all the stuff that was set up in an economy which largely depended on the multiplication of physical things. They don鈥檛 work any longer.
All these concepts have to be changed. I think the clearest thing to do is never have any patents on any software. I don鈥檛 know which part of the Web we could have patented. It was an idea, the standard way of doing things, and that should be what comes out of research institutes like ours and it should be freely accessible to everyone. In the specific case of the World Wide Web, the most important part is the 鈥渟tandard鈥�. This is the method through which the Web works and should not be patented.
Has the Web turned out the way you intended it to?
In the beginning, we wanted an information system. We wanted to be able to put things there, to link them together, to find stuff. It was certainly not at all concerned with printing anything out or with presenting graphics on the screen. Another fundamental concept was that we wanted users of the Web to be able to publish as well as read Web pages. We still have to work on that a lot. We are slowly getting there because today when you sign up with an Internet Service Provider for an Internet account you also get with it some disc space for your own website. But there was a time span of about five years, a kind of Dark Ages, when it became very, very difficult for users of the Web to publish and host their own Web pages.
Are there times when you wish that you could have more influence in guiding the way that the Web develops?
Yes. But it鈥檚 simply not possible. There is what I would like and there is what most people accept. One should not lament over the property that the Web has: being adaptable to all tastes.
One of your ideas is that people-ordinary users-should need a licence to use the Web. What sort of licence? And won鈥檛 this restrict the Web to an elite few?
It鈥檚 all about education. If you don鈥檛 know what to make of information, you鈥檙e lost. Do you have a licence to read books? Yes, you do, because, depending on which country you live in, there is compulsory education until you are 14 or 16. During that time you are taught to read and write and to understand texts. You cannot get round that. So when you come out of school, you have a sort of licence to read books. Hopefully in the near future, schools will teach network media, how to work with the Net, and that doesn鈥檛 mean only the Web, but also e-mail and all the other systems.
Does that mean you want the Web, or the Internet, to be regulated?
The Net is a space in which you encounter others, so there has to be some regulation of behaviour, but not content. Just this morning I received a few spam e-mails. I can鈥檛 send them back, because the return addresses have been faked. One type of regulation that would be good is: if you send me a message, I should have the right to reply to you. I don鈥檛 care what鈥檚 in your message-that鈥檚 content, and I don鈥檛 want that to be censored.
Who do you think should be deciding these regulations and enforcing them?
This is something to implement in international conventions and for citizens to reflect and decide on. Unfortunately we have a global network, a global economy and global companies, but we have not got a global legal system. Never before have we lived in a situation like this.
How would your licence system work? Would I have to take a test to use the Web?
Exactly like driving licences. They do not ensure that you will not break the speed limit, but they can be taken away if you do. And again: a traffic regulation only limits behaviour, not content. You can drive where you want, when you want, provided you do it with safe behaviour towards other traffic users. What I want is behaviour regulation. We should all know what our rights and duties are. Teach it in schools. Hand out a licence that shows one has passed a test of minimal awareness.
Another idea you support is 鈥渕icropayments鈥�, in which Web users pay tiny amounts to authors of websites to download pages, cutting out the need for sites to depend on advertising.
I should make it clear that requesting payment would be entirely a decision for authors. It would not be a tax or an obligatory mechanism, but would create a real, competitive market for information providing. So, for example, if you want to download news, you would not be locked into buying an expensive, annual subscription to one newspaper. You would simply pay two Eurocents for sports news from one paper, and pay five for political news from a different paper. But the problem is whether we can put this technology into place. It has been around the corner and imminent for the last 5 or 6 years, but I have not seen it yet.
Wouldn鈥檛 all users need electronic bank accounts to do this?
Yes, you would need electronic cash, or its equivalent. But I don鈥檛 know the details of the technology or even if it is globally possible. To a certain extent, it has been implemented very successfully in France with the Minitel system, but to transport it onto the Internet and on a global scale is certainly a serious challenge.
How would such a system work in practice? Would you have to go to a separate screen each time which would tell you the cost of a download?
You could, but why should it be so complicated? You could tell your browser: 鈥淲arn me if anything costs more than, say, 1 Euro, otherwise don鈥檛 bother.鈥� This is how Minitel works. You are told the cost, but you usually don鈥檛 look at that. You get high-quality information, and you know it is going to cost you a little bit.
With so many amounts of money going backwards and forwards, wouldn鈥檛 this open up opportunities for fraud?
This is related to the encryption issue. Do we want encryption everywhere or not? These are issues consumers have to think about as well: will they allow legislation on encryption? On the other hand, of course, if you have encryption and all bank transfers are safe, then the same applies to transfers of illegal content that has been encrypted. This is why building trust-and how we do that as a technology-is a much greater concern for me and for Tim than patenting.
Do you ever feel responsible for the things that people do on the Web, and the changes, good or bad, that it has made to all our lives?
Never. Why should I feel responsible? Scientific knowledge and technology in themselves are neutral. If someone else uses it badly, all I can try to do is to warn people of potential abuses. I find it more important to point to good uses and good practice. I鈥檝e done this all along. I sometimes feel sad when I see it abused, and I cannot help that. But I鈥檓 also very happy when I see what kids can get out of it, how it is helping teachers, researchers, individuals in remote places. One comment that will always be with me came from a teenager in a poor district who accessed the Web from the school library. She said: 鈥淎 library, yes, there are some books there. But on the Web, you get everything!鈥� Things like that go straight to the heart: we did some good.
Will you ever leave CERN?
That鈥檚 a good question. I鈥檝e been here 25 years and had wildly different jobs and roles in that time. I started as a controls engineer, then I went into personal computing and then into documentation and in the end I did the Web for almost 10 years. Now I am going over into public education and telling people why fundamental research institutes like CERN are important and that is something that has always interested me. Now that I can do it full-time I don鈥檛 see any good reason to leave tomorrow.