In 1989 Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for a hypertext information system at CERN, which his manager Mike Sendall returned marked 'Vague but exciting.' With no formal mandate, he built the first browser and server on a NeXT computer, labelling the machine 'This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN' so no one would accidentally take the nascent Web offline.
The Web's defining property is that any document can link to any other without the target's owner granting permission or registering with a central authority. This asymmetry, links point outward freely, is what lets the system scale without a coordinating body approving each connection.
Berners-Lee argues the Web spread because CERN released the protocols royalty-free rather than licensing them, removing the risk that a competing proprietary standard would fragment the space. He contends a technology meant to be universal cannot be owned, since any toll or gatekeeper would break the incentive for everyone to adopt the same one.
Berners-Lee insists the Web is a neutral space whose character is defined by what people put on it, not by the technology itself, so blaming the medium for bad content is a category error. Design decisions should therefore keep the underlying protocols content-agnostic, leaving social and editorial judgments to the people using them.