Berners-Lee needed the open platform of the Internet for his hypertext creation to take flight, and thus the many individuals who built ARPANET and TCP/IP should be understood as essential contributors to the Web. Had those platforms been more proprietary ones—say, by charging licensing fees for the privilege of developing on top of them—it’s entirely possible that Berners-Lee wouldn’t have bothered creating the Web in the first place, given that it was a side project that his superiors knew next to nothing about.
