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Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist, established the World Wide Web in 1989. On Wednesday, he auctioned off the internet in the form of a non-fungible token, or NFT, which went for $5.4 million to an unidentified buyer.
Sotheby’s
Sotheby’s auctioned the Web’s original source code for $5.4 million on Wednesday, 32 years after English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee published “Information Management: A Proposal,” the birth of the World Wide Web. Of course, it was in the form of a nonfungible token, or NFT. According to Sotheby’s, the source code for the Web was sold to an unidentified buyer. On the NFT, there were a total of 51 bids.
“NFTs, whether they’re artworks or digital artifacts like this,” Berners-Lee said in a statement about the sale, “are the most appropriate means of ownership that exists.” “They’re the perfect method to bundle the Web’s roots.”
From June 23 to June 30, Sotheby’s held an auction titled “This Changed Everything,” with bidding starting at $1,000. Digital collectibles, such as NFTs, have lately been introduced to the offers of the British-founded global marketplace for art treasures. The $5.4 million will be used to support Tim Berners-endeavors, Lee’s such as his open source technology Solid.
NFTs are quickly becoming a way for members of the digital community to create a virtual museum and document historic moments on the internet, whether it was the $4 million sale of the Doge meme NFT, or when Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold an NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million, or when digital artist Itzel Yard sold an NFT art made from the key of the first Tor Browser, making her the highest-seen digital artist in the world.
Gauthier Zuppinger is one of the co-founders of nonfungible.com, a database that tracks the sales of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and crypto collectibles. He compared the source code to CryptoPunks, one of the Ethereum blockchain’s first non-fungible coins. The code’s uniqueness and enormous importance in the construction of the digital world, according to Zuppinger, led to the NFT’s increasing bidding price.
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So, what does the anonymous purchaser get? Because the source code for the web has been in the public domain since 1991, when CERN released the international web code library, it does not receive any unique usage rights.
The NFT itself has a plethora of technical tidbits and pearls from the Web’s origins. The original time-stamped files containing the code written between October 1990 and August 1991 are among the four pieces. The implementation of three innovations developed by the physicist-turned-software developer are depicted in the 9,555 lines of code produced in the Objective-C programming language: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), HTTP (Hyper Transfer Protocol), and URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). A message from Berners-Lee, an animated depiction, and a digital poster of the code will also be sent to the buyer.
“Given how much people appear to value autographed editions of books, and now that we have NFT technology, I thought it could be amusing to make an autographed copy of the original code of the first web browser,” Berners-Lee writes in his statement.
Berners-Lee is not only the creator of the Web, but also a director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees its development. As co-founder and chief technology officer of Inrupt, he is polishing open source technology called Solid in order to bring the Web closer to his initial vision of it as a shared knowledge place for all members of society.
Dr. Merav Ozair, a fintech faculty member at Rutgers Business School and an expert on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, compared the NFT sale of the World Wide Web source code to the historic moment when the United States of America’s founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. The only difference is that the programming that built the internet also altered how the world works today.
“This was also a historic moment when he produced a code that started everything, and this isn’t just for the United States; it’s for the entire world,” she explains.
The auction, according to Ozair, is the start of Web 3.0, a version of the internet where cryptocurrencies thrive.
The web’s source code is already in the public domain. Berners-Lee actually fought CERN officials to have it that way, according to Marc Webber, curator of the Computer History Museum’s internet history program.
“It’s a little perplexing.” Webber, who has been examining the history of the web since 1995, says, “You know, you’ve got an NFT on this absolutely public domain open thing.”
According to Webber, the auction has sparked interest in web history. However, the monetization of computer and technology history may make it difficult for museum curators like him to obtain such digital relics, especially since NFTs provide owners lump sum payouts and exposure to a large audience.
Berners-Lee, according to Webber, has had numerous opportunities to profit from his invention but has always declined so that the web remains in the public domain. “I understand that this isn’t just a ruse to gain money,” he says./nRead More

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