Rebecca MacKinnon Quotes

Tim Berners-Lee, the 44-year-old English physicist who created the World Wide Web, is precisely the kind of hero that a relatively simple invention with profound social and economic consequences should lay claim to. He is not just creative but democratic, diplomatic, polite and generous with credit and praise.

If someone had protected the HTML language for making Web pages, then we wouldn't have the World Wide Web.

World Wide Web: Proposal for a HyperText Project

When I was at MIT, they had a beta test of Mosaic, the first popular browser. I remember looking at it, and there was a weather map or something. Now, in fairness to me, there weren't any websites then. But I remember saying, 'This is stupid - what's the point?' Now, of course, it's obvious.

I remember being given a demo of the 'World Wide Web' at Peter Gabriel's studio in the early 90s, and I had zero comprehension that I was staring into the future. I was just happy with my pager and teletext on the TV.

The secret of the Internet's success has been its openness to new services.

The Internet has always been, and always will be, a magic box.

The technological breakthrough of the World Wide Web has been enormously beneficial to society.

The government invented the Internet.

When it broke out in the mid 1990s, the web was society's first at-scale digital artifact. It spread in orders of ten, first thousands, then millions, then hundreds of millions of pages - and on it went, to the billions it now encompasses.

I wouldn't be anywhere without the Internet.

Here's the thing: I fell impossibly in love with the Internet from the minute I saw it in action in the early 1990s. From that moment on, I have studied it, analyzed it, reported on it, and, mostly, have not been without it as a part of my daily life since.

The Internet is probably the most important technological advancement of my lifetime. Its strength lies in its open architecture and its ability to allow a framework where all voices can be heard.

Web 2.0 is a grand utopian movement. It worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone--even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us--can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 "empowers" our creativity, it "democratizes" media, it "levels the playing field" between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is "elitist" traditional media.

The Cube is approximately - it's around the same age as the Internet, and in that time, we had no personal computers yet.

The Internet, man, is a beautiful thing.

The Internet never ceases to impress me.

The Internet is crazy, and I love it!

The beauty of the Internet is pretty much unlimited.

Only with the Internet can a peasant I have never met hear my voice and I can learn what's on his mind. A fairy tale has come true.

Few influential people involved with the Internet claim that it is a good in and of itself. It is a powerful tool for solving social problems, just as it is a tool for making money, finding lost relatives, receiving medical advice, or, come to that, trading instructions for making bombs.

I think there certainly was a milestone in the '90s with regards to the Internet achieving critical mass. There were several magical factors that came together: the creation of HTML by Tim Berners-Lee, the drop in the price of communications, and all the PCs out there that you could put this software into.

The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for.

After all, the internet originated around 1960 and wasn't privatized until 1995. That's thirty five years in the public domain during the hard, creative development period.

The internet is necessarily public. It can be filtered-public or censored-public, but it necessarily has to be open and available.