Chairman Markey, Ranking Member Upton, and Members of the Committee. It is my honor to appear before you today to discuss the future of the World Wide Web. I would like to offer some of my experience of having designed the original foundations of the Web, what I've learned from watching it grow, and some of the exciting and challenging developments I see in the future of the Web. Though I was privileged to lead the effort that gave rise to the Web in the mid-1990s, it has long passed the point of being something designed by a single person or even a single organization. It has become a public resource upon which many individuals, communities, companies and governments depend. And, from its beginning, it is a medium that has been created and sustained by the cooperative efforts of people all over the world.
The success of the World Wide Web, itself built on the open Internet, has depended on three critical factors: 1) unlimited links from any part of the Web to any other; 2) open technical standards as the basis for continued growth of innovation applications; and 3) separation of network layers, enabling independent innovation for network transport, routing and information applications. Today these characteristics of the Web are easily overlooked as obvious, self-maintaining, or just unimportant. All who use the Web to publish or access information take it for granted that any Web page on the planet will be accessible to anyone who has an Internet connection, regardless whether it is over a dialup modem or a high speed multi-megabit per second digital access line.
The Web has not only been a venue for the free exchange of ideas, but also it has been a platform for the creation of a wide and unanticipated variety of new services. Commercial applications including eBay, Google, Yahoo, and Amazon.com are but a few examples of the extraordinary innovation that is possible because of the open, standards-based, royalty-free technology that makes up the Web. Whether developing an auction site, a search engine, or a new way of selling consumer goods, e-commerce entrepreneurs have been able develop new services with confidence that they will be available for use by anyone with an Internet connection and a Web browser, regardless of operating system, computer hardware, or the ISP chosen by that user.[5] Innovation in the non-commercial and government domains has been equally robust. Early Web sites such as Thomas have led the way in efforts to make the legislative process more open and transparent, and non-commercial sites such as the Wikipedia have pioneered new collaborate styles of information sharing. The flexibility and openness inherent in Web standards also make this medium a powerful foundation on which to build services and applications that are truly accessible for people with disabilities, as well as people who need to transform content for purposes other than that for which it was originally intended.
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