2015-5-19 // by Ian Jacobs

On 12 March 2014 the World Wide Web Foundation (WF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the launch of this site as a shared space to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Web and raise awareness about key challenges ahead. We received thousands of birthday greetings from around the world. We’ve highlighted a few of our favorites.

The launch a year ago was just the start of working with organizations and people around the world on technology and policy issues to help ensure the Web will remain “for everyone” into the future. Here are some of the highlights:

  • We collaborated with the Webby Awards on the Webbys 25 for 25, a collection of essays, art projects, films, and Web mementos.
  • The Web Foundation launched the Web We Want movement to bring people together from around the world to defend, claim and change a Web that is for everyone. This has included putting together the world’s first Web We Want Festival series with London’s Southbank centre - the closing weekend is 28-30 May 2015.
  • In April 2014, Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff signed the first Internet Bill of Rights —the Marco Civil da Internet— into law.
  • In August 2014, Tim Berners-Lee gave a TED talk where he called for a “Magna Carta for the Web”
  • In October 2014, W3C celebrated its 20th anniversary at a Symposium on the Future of the Web, including presentations from Vint Cerf, US FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, Fadi Chehadé, Darren Walker and many other luminaries.
  • In December 2015, the WF announced the 2014-2015 edition of the Web Index, which measures the Web’s contribution to social, economic and political progress in countries across the world. At the launch, Sir Tim Berners-Lee called for the Internet to be recognized as a basic human right.
  • In February 2015, US FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler announced proposed rules supportive of net neutrality, which the WF hailed as great news even as there remains more work to do.

The webat25.org archive has a lot more from the year of activities.

We would like to thank all of the Web25 sponsors who supported this work: the Ford Foundation, ICANN, Intel XDK, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Twitter, and Yahoo!

With this post we are “freezing” this site. But the work is not done to ensure the Web remains available to all. We invited you to follow the Web Foundation news and W3C news and, more importantly, get involved in ensuring the Web of tomorrow is the Web We Want!