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  By Tim Berners-Lee When I designed a global hypertext system and decided to call it World Wide Web, I was pretty much a European-an Englishman living at times in France, at times in Switzerland, while working at cern, the physics lab that straddles the Franco-Swiss border at Geneva. Cern is a great meeting place of bright, excited people from many countries, an intellectual and cultural melting pot beyond compare. Therefore I already belonged to a number of different overlapping communities. I was a member of |
the international community of high-energy physics and also of the global community of the strange, informal, tolerant and predominantly technical people who sent news articles and electronic mail over the linked computer systems known as the Internet. Neither of these communities was related to geographical borders. Since then, the spread of the Web has left many people asking whether in a few years the geographical boundaries of entities like Europe will be irrelevant, and if they are, what will be left. Will Europe survive the information age? Will it become an informational annex of the U.S.? This leads to some fundamental questions as to what it will be like to exist on this earth when we all have access to the network. Predictions range from the horrible to the idyllic, and sometimes the difference between the two is a matter of point of view. The Web has rushed through the U.S. in a way that it cannot through Europe. The heat of excitement about the content already on the Web fuels the pouring of greater and greater resources into providing more content, more facilities, better organization and cataloging. There is a vicious circle, in that the more 1 of 5 
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