Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web, its trajectory was impossible to imagine.

It's so good still to have one of the originating people of modern technology and culture actively advocating about its development, because the originating people carry the original values with them.

Underlying its whole infrastructure was the intention to allow for collaboration, foster compassion and generate creativity – what I term the 3 C’s. It was to be a tool to empower humanity.

That is a long-lived personal feeling to which I'd never heard these words put.

Because Tim, proving his sincerity about his intent, chose to allow the Web's technology to be uncontrollable by any one entity, I've usually supposed it's ultimately meaningless to say the Web "has values." Openness means that anyone can use it to promote or denigrate any values, even those Tim mentioned, just as the concept of legal free speech protects those speaking against the concept of legal free speech. Ultimately, I think that's true: in making it open, Tim gave up the right to assert or impose his own values on the Web. Indeed, as it's become so capable, the Web has been used to promote compassion as well as conquest, collaboration as well as the adoption of every traditional content consumption industry, creativity as well as the discouragement and shaming of genuine and well-meaning expression.

And "a tool to empower humanity"? While the Web provides access to much of human knowledge and skill, I think the most empowering thing about the Web has always been how easy it is to participate in the creation of it, just as the most empowering thing about literacy is learning to read and write, rather than spending your whole childhood or adulthood just having things read to you. In my experience, Web enthusiasts almost uniformly cite the Web's earliest days as the most exciting ones, and I suspect that's because using and creating the Web felt more like that kind of a single skill. It's been normal to learn to read and write together since long before the Web. If polled today, 35 years into the Web, how many of a random thousand Web users would say they knew how to write a simple page?

Other metrics of "a tool to empower humanity" come to mind, of course, and while there's at least more public awareness about terms like "tracking" and "fingerprinting," the acts themselves are more typically meant to take advantage of users, not to empower them. If the Web had evolved under this value, the possibility of those acts either should not exist, or should be explicitly permitted by users. "You may track me" should be the text on the button, rather than the more realistically familiar "don't track me" (or the less seen, yet also realistic, lack of an offered option).

But, short of "ultimately," it's still meaningful to hear Tim's own intended values reaffirmed. When I use the Web to share my own thoughts, or to learn what others think, or to look something up, or to share my own music or films, I can know I'm using the Web the way its creator meant it to be used. It's more than a bonus fleck of trivia; it's something that feels right, has always felt right, and is shared by Web enthusiasts who were around since the Web's early days, and those recent arrivals who recognize it.

• Tim's full letter