The World Wide Web Consortium was convened in 1994 at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. Most computer manufacturers, universities, and software manufacturers joined the Consortium. Its headquarters was at MIT, and Berners-Lee moved from France to Cambridge, Mass., to act as its head. The reason the Consortium was possible at that time and still lives is the peculiar stage in the development of the industry it supports. The dot-com gamblers can expect to do this only by smiling at us, keeping their derringers in their boot tops and collaborating with each other to expand the Web.
Growth is very important to the speculator.
This kind of society makes us just as nervous as it does Berners-Lee. He looks at the Consortium and sees no representative for the individual and no one seems to be asking what kind of society is being represented. Despite the tensions inside the Consortium, Berners-Lee wants to show how technical expertise can head off trouble at the pass. This proposed set of regulations would allow censoring the Web and the Internet and granted police power to everyone from a bureaucrat to a child's parent. This way, the user was responsible for the censorship, not the Web people nor the service providers.