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c o n s o r t i u m

Whether inspired by free-market desires or humanistic ideals, we all felt that control was the wrong perspective. I made it clear that I had designed the Web so there should be no centralized place where someone would have to "register" a new server, or get approval of its contents. Anybody could build a server and put anything on it. Philosophically, if the Web was to be a universal resource, it had to be able to grow in an unlimited way. Technically, if there was any centralized point of control, it would rapidly become a bottleneck that restricted the Web's growth, and the Web would never scale up. Its being "out of control" was very important.

The international telephone system offers a decent analogy. The reason we can plug in a telephone pretty much anywhere in the world is because industry agreed on certain standard interfaces. The voltages and signals on the wire are almost exactly the same everywhere. And given the right adapter, we can plug in a wide range of devices from different companies that send all sorts of information, from voice to fax to video. The phone system defines what it has to, but then leaves how it is used up to the devices. That's what we needed for computers on the Web.

On December 15, the day after the first consortium meeting, Netscape released the commercial version of Mozilla, renamed Navigator 1.0. It was compatible with Microsoft's Windows operating system, the X Windows system on Unix, and Macintosh. The browser was significant not so much for its technical features, but for the way in which Mosaic released it. Rather than shrink-wrap and ship it, Netscape released it over the Internet. And rather than charge for it, it was free. Within several months the majority of people on the Web were using it.

Andreessen was following the model by which all previous Web software had been released, except that this time the software was coming from a commercial company that was supposed to make money. People wondered where the profit was going to come from.