WIPO boss: the Web would have been better if it was patented

I don't think that the web would have even been patentable. HTTP is essentially FTP without persistent sessions. HTML was based on SGML. And hypertext existed before it was used in HTML (1960s). So there seems to be too much prior art there for it to be patentable.

Also, the demise of Gopher, an early competitor of the web, gives us a hint of what might have happened if the web had been patented. From Wikipedia's Gopher article:

"In February 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server. As a consequence of this, some users were concerned that a licensing fee would also be charged for independent implementations. Users were scared away from Gopher technology, to the advantage of the Web, which CERN disclaimed ownership of. The University of Minnesota later re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU GPL."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

Wow. You see some asinine things on the internet from time to time but thats in a category all of its own.

Well this isn't inflammatory political choir-preachery that should be flagged.