Berners-Lee for president!

I knew something extraordinary was happening when I showed up to write a news story yesterday about Tim Berners-Lee speaking at the first Mobile Internet World in Boston.

The reason I knew this: a tall man in his 50s walked up to me as I was sitting on the front row of the hall where he Berners-Lee was about to speak and asked me, “Are you Tim Berners-Lee?”

I said I wasn’t and then he asked if I knew who Berners-Lee was, so he could get his autograph. I said I didn’t really know if he was already in the hall, but then he found out Berners-Lee was talking to several other people nearby, all of whom seemed like they were hoping to get his autograph. It was not the kind of crowd that surrounds a major league pitcher or a politician, but they were true fans.

Berners-Lee took a great deal of time with each one, and then took the podium after being introduced as the “father of the World Wide Web,” a title he didn’t ignore, but didn’t flaunt either.

I have seen him talk before, but in this setting he almost seemed like a parish pastor or priest, not extremely polished or flashy, but exceedingly devoted to a cause. He didn’t present anything with PowerPoint, yet made an eloquent argument in favor of keeping the mobile Internet truly open, in hopes it would imitate the wired Internet. Why?

Well, if you keep the mobile Internet open, it will allow all the kinds of innovations we have come to see in the existing Internet, he explained. Berners-Lee talked about adopting mobile standards and avoiding proprietary systems that force people to use a single site to download music or require them to stick with one carrier for a cell phone subscription. He said he favored his personal habit of switching his SIM card from phone model to phone model, something nearly all Americans cannot do. I wrote "Berners-Lee urges vendors to keep mobile Internet open" explaining all this but long after the story was posted realized I had left out a comment Berners-Lee made that seemed almost naïve at the time. He said he wanted to see the mobile Web left open to allow the kinds of exchanges between all kinds of people that “can lead to very important things such as cures for AIDS and cancer.”

That comment didn’t really sink in until a while later. I left the hall and wrote a story in a nearby press room and then ran into an analyst I admire and told him how polite and diplomatic Berners-Lee was in not attacking any particular vendors or wireless service providers for being proprietary. “That’s because he’s British,” the analyst said, with a smile.

Indeed. Here was this gracious Brit talking about how important this new tool, the mobile Web, can become if given half a chance. He made his plea without cutting down the vendors who often make the big decisions about this new technology.

More important, Berners-Lee was asking all of us to take the long view of the mobile Web. It reminded me that most of the companies charged with the future of the mobile Web are racing against the clock known as the quarterly earnings statement. They are forced to seek profits for the short-term, while their investors show very little patience for technologies that take years to prove themselves.

Berners-Lee doesn’t really operate in the world of the profiteers, having held onto several academic positions and still serving as director of the World Wide Web Consortium. He’s a bit of a mystical figure, but the industry can use that.