Why there’s no European Google?

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The Internet, the interconnection of most of the computers in the world, has existed since the late sixties. But no protocol existed to actually exploit that network, to explore and search for information. At the time, you needed to know exactly what you wanted and where to find it. That’s why the USA tried to develop a protocol called “Gopher.”

At the same time, the “World Wide Web,” composed of the HTTP protocol and the HTML format, was invented by a British citizen and a Belgian citizen who were working in a European research facility located in Switzerland. But the building was on the border with France, and there’s much historical evidence pointing to the Web and its first server having been invented in France.

It’s hard to be more European than the Web! It looks like the Official European Joke! (And, yes, I consider Brits Europeans. They will join us back, we miss them, I promise.)

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Google, Microsoft, Facebook may disappear tomorrow. It is even very probable that they will not exist in fourty or fifty years. It would even be a good thing. But could you imagine the world without the Web? Without HTML? Without Linux?

Those European endeavours are now a fundamental infrastructure of all humanity. Those technologies are definitely part of our long-term history.

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There are so many ways in which the UK has had to choose – and continues to have to choose – which side of the Atlantic it belongs on: the North American side, or the European side. Legally, politically, financially, culturally… And every time we swing away from Europe, it saddens me.

This wonderful article by Lionel Dricot encapsulates one of many reasons why. European tech culture, compared to that in the USA, leans more open-source, more open-standards, more collaborative. That’s the culture I want more of.

Worth a read.