The internet was built by idealists who gave it away for nothing. Then the enclosers arrived — and now they want to make sure you can never leave.

The internet was not invented by a corporation. It was not the product of a venture capital roadmap, a government procurement exercise, or a Silicon Valley pitch deck. It was built by a small group of extraordinarily gifted people who, for the most part, shared what they built freely and asked for nothing in return. Their story is told with forensic, compelling detail in Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Making of the Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon — a book that every politician who has ever uttered the words "online safety" should be required to read before they are permitted to speak on the subject.^[1]

The architecture of the modern internet begins with J.C.R. Licklider, a psychologist and computer scientist at MIT who, in 1962, wrote a series of memos describing what he called an "Intergalactic Computer Network" — a vision of globally interconnected machines sharing information freely across distance and institutional boundaries.^[2] He did not patent it. He did not form a company around it. He published it, took a position at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, and spent his career funding other people to build it.

Bob Taylor, Licklider's successor at ARPA, secured the funding that created ARPANET — the military and academic research network that became the skeletal precursor to the internet as we know it. Larry Roberts designed its technical architecture. The critical breakthrough — the protocols that allow machines on entirely different networks to communicate — came from Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. Their Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, TCP/IP, published in 1974, are the foundational grammar of the modern internet.^[3] They published it openly. No patent. No licence fee. No royalty. They asked for nothing.

Then came Tim Berners-Lee.

A British computer scientist working at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Berners-Lee in 1989 wrote a proposal for what he described as an information management system — a way of linking documents across computers using hypertext.^[4] Working with his colleague Robert Cailliau, he developed HTTP, HTML, and the URL — the three foundational technologies of the web as we experience it today. By the end of 1990 he had a working browser and server running at CERN. He had, in effect, built the web.

He could have patented every line of it. He would have become one of the wealthiest people in human history. Instead, on 30 April 1993, CERN published a statement that has done more for human civilisation than any single document in the history of computing.

No royalties. No licence fees. No enclosure. The web, given to humanity for nothing by people who understood exactly what they were giving away.

The W3C, the standards body Berners-Lee founded in 1994, has since maintained royalty-free web standards as an absolute commitment — recognising that this open platform was what allowed software companies to build products, e-commerce to flourish, and an entire generation of social and civic life to exist online, at no charge to any of them.^[6]

Keep that in mind. We will return to it.

The People Who Profited From It

Now let us talk about a rather different kind of person.

Bill Gates and the Operating System He Didn't Write

Bill Gates is one of the most celebrated figures in the history of technology. The story most people know is of a Harvard dropout who wrote code in a garage and built an empire through brilliance. The story that is actually on the public record is considerably more instructive.

Microsoft's first commercial product was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800. BASIC itself — the language — was developed in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College, who made it freely available to anyone who wanted it.^[7] Gates took an open academic language, implemented a version of it, and charged for access. The pattern was established early.

The story of MS-DOS is worse. In 1980, IBM was developing the IBM Personal Computer and needed an operating system. Their first approach — to Gary Kildall, whose company Digital Research had developed the dominant OS of the era, CP/M — broke down. IBM came to Microsoft. Microsoft did not have an operating system.^[8]

Microsoft renamed QDOS as MS-DOS, licensed it to IBM as PC-DOS, and — in a stroke of commercial acumen that IBM's lawyers failed to notice — retained the rights to license the same operating system to any other manufacturer. When PC clones proliferated, Microsoft owned the operating system on every one of them. Tim Paterson received $75,000 in total. Gates became the richest man in the world.

When people speak of the genius of Bill Gates, they are, in large part, describing the genius of knowing when to write a cheque, what not to disclose, and which clause to retain when the other side's lawyers weren't paying attention.

Larry Ellison and the Paper He Read

In June 1970, Edgar F. "Ted" Codd — a British mathematician working at IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory — published a paper in the Communications of the ACM that would change computing permanently. Titled "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks," it described a theoretical architecture for storing and retrieving data in linked tables using a simple query language, without requiring the user to understand the underlying physical structure of the database.^[10] Codd received the Turing Award — computing's equivalent of a Nobel Prize — for this work in 1981.^[11]

IBM, recognising the commercial threat this posed to its existing hierarchical database product, was slow to exploit Codd's ideas. Its engineers eventually developed a language called SEQUEL — later renamed SQL — though they did so without properly involving Codd, and produced something that deviated from his theoretical model.^[12]

Larry Ellison read the pre-publication conference papers describing IBM's work. In 1977, his company produced Oracle — a commercial relational database built directly on the publicly shared IBM research — and brought it to market before IBM's own commercial product.^[13] The relational database market became a multi-billion dollar industry. Oracle became one of the most profitable software companies in history. Codd spent the following years fighting a "sometimes bitter campaign" to prevent the term "relational database" from being misused by vendors — including Oracle — who had added a relational veneer to older technology without genuinely implementing his model.^[14]

Codd died in 2003. Oracle's current market capitalisation is approximately $400 billion. The open academic research that Ellison read and implemented made him one of the wealthiest people on earth.

Mark Zuckerberg and the Network He May Have Stolen

In late 2003, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and their Harvard classmate Divya Narendra commissioned a fellow student — Mark Zuckerberg — to build a social networking site they called HarvardConnection. Between November 2003 and February 2004, Zuckerberg exchanged 52 emails with the HarvardConnection team and attended multiple in-person meetings, while allegedly stalling their project.^[15] During the same period, he was building TheFacebook — which launched in February 2004.

The lawsuit that followed settled in February 2008 for a reported $65 million — $20 million in cash and $45 million in Facebook stock. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals subsequently upheld the settlement.^[16]

Zuckerberg's response to The Social Network — David Fincher's 2010 film depicting him as a man who built his empire on betrayal — was not to dispute the substance. His primary public objection was that the film had misrepresented his wardrobe.

These men — Gates, Ellison, Zuckerberg — did not build the internet. They built businesses on top of what others built, what others published, what others gave away. They are the enclosers. And the commons they enclosed now underpins their argument for why you should hand them your identity.

The Equaliser They Are Trying to Avoid

Steve Jobs, in his 2005 Stanford commencement address, offered a view of death that extends far beyond the personal: "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."^[17] He was talking about human mortality. But the principle applies perfectly to corporations — and the companies who built empires on the open commons understand this better than anyone. They are in decline. And they know it.

Windows once had a stranglehold on personal computing. Today it runs on a shrinking fraction of the world's connected devices. Linux — open source, free, the ideological descendant of everything Gates tried to enclose — runs the servers that power the internet, the phones in everyone's pockets via Android, and the desktops of an increasing number of engineers who tired of Microsoft's evolution into a surveillance platform dressed in a productivity suite. The iPhone and the smartphone revolution took an entire category of personal computing away from Microsoft before Microsoft understood what was happening.^[18]

Oracle's database, once the only credible option at enterprise scale, faces PostgreSQL — open source, free, and by most technical measures its equal or superior — as well as MySQL, MariaDB, and a generation of distributed databases that the open source community has produced. The commons that Ellison exploited to build his fortune has produced tools that are systematically replacing his products. The irony is structural and total.^[19]

Facebook has lost the young. The share of US teenagers who say they use Facebook dropped from 71% in 2015 to 32% in 2023.^[20] The metaverse pivot burned over $47 billion in losses between 2021 and 2023 and produced nothing of meaningful value.^[21]

Under the normal rules of the market — the rules that ended Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia — these companies should face their reckoning. New things should emerge. Old things should die. Jobs was right: death is the change agent.

Digital identity infrastructure changes the equation entirely. If Google authenticates your identity across the web, if Facebook's infrastructure becomes the verification layer that governments and platforms defer to, then it no longer matters that their core products have been surpassed. They become utilities. Toll booths. They stop needing to be good — they need only to be necessary.

Tony Blair — the man whose last national ID card scheme was repealed by the coalition government in 2011 — now runs an institute that has spent 2025 calling for digital ID, with Blair publicly arguing that British people would "sacrifice privacy for efficiency."^[22] Old power that lost its grip, looking for new infrastructure to grip with.

Death is the best invention of life. Digital ID is an attempt to make certain companies exempt from it.

Next: Part 2 — The Commons. What the open internet actually gave us, the man who died defending it, and what we lose if anonymous access ends.