Out of the shadows

Take a roll call of the founders of the Web, and you’ll find Robert Cailliau near the top. “Robert who?” you may ask, as Cailliau, an informatics specialist at CERN, is unknown. His role has been eclipsed by Tim Berners-Lee, his former colleague at the particle physics lab near Geneva where the Web took root. But that’s about to change when Cailliau’s book, How the Web was Born, is published next month. He may be the Web’s quiet man, but Cailliau has strong views about its future. He thinks Web users need a “surfing licence”, and should pay to download pages. …