> That’s why, in 1993, I convinced my Cern managers to donate the intellectual property of the world wide web, putting it into the public domain. We gave the web away to everyone.

Might something else have emerged instead if CERN had said no? Who knows. Without the Web, the Internet itself might have stayed in its primarily research and academic domain. The rapid growth of the Web is in part what motivated the commercialization of the Internet and the "Information Superhighway", and then came the entrepeneurs and VCs, and well, here we are.

Could it have all happened based on Gopher instead? Who knows.

> The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1993.

And the http protocol sits on top of the stack. Routing, dns, nat, etc all do not matter to http.

HTTP is basically “this is how you send a document over the wire”.