Webwereld

» see webwereld.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Every country that got online early grew its own tech news site, and from outside they all look interchangeable while from inside they are nothing of the sort. In Turkey that was donanimhaber, where i read hardware threads and built forum signatures listing what was in my case. In the Netherlands it was Webwereld, and it started in November 1995, which is early enough that it predates most of what it went on to report about.

Oscar Kneppers had been to Silicon Valley that summer and came home with the obvious idea that nobody in his country had acted on yet. Webwereld went up before the Dutch consumer internet really existed, and rode the whole thing: the dial-up years, the dot-com boom that Amsterdam took as hard as anywhere, then broadband, then everything after. In its first stretch it sat inside the ten most-visited websites in the Netherlands, which for a publication about computers says more about how small the Dutch web was than about how big Webwereld got.

Kneppers did not stay. He went on to found Emerce and then Bright, both of which outlived the thing he started first, and Webwereld passed to IDG, the American trade publisher whose business is running the same handful of titles in forty countries. That transfer is the whole story of what happened twenty years later, sitting there quietly in 1990s paperwork.

~ the record ~

~ lektober ~

In October 2011 Webwereld ran the piece of work it is actually remembered for. The name is a Dutch pun that welds lek, meaning leak, onto oktober, and the format was brutally simple: every single day of the month, publish one previously undisclosed security hole at a prominent Dutch organization. Not a roundup at the end. One a day, thirty-one days, named institutions.

Brenno de Winter did most of it. The targets were universities and municipalities, the sort of organization that holds citizen data because the law obliges it to and secures that data at whatever level nobody has complained about yet. Running it as a daily serial rather than one investigation was the tactical choice that made it work, because a single story gets one denial and a month-long drip means every remaining institution in the country spends thirty-one mornings wondering whether today is its turn. The Dutch data protection authority and parliament both ended up dealing with the fallout.

~ what really happened ~

IDG announced on 19 February 2020 that Webwereld would stop, and the site published for the last time on 1 March. The editorial team, four people under editor-in-chief Sander van der Meijs, had already been sent home about a month before the announcement, which means the decision was made and executed before anyone was told. Twenty-two positions went across the Dutch operation, roughly a quarter of IDG's staff there.

The stated reason was a change of direction: keep the business titles, drop the consumer one, and serve the Benelux from computerworld.com and cio.com in a mix of Dutch and English. Read plainly, that is a publisher deciding that locally-written technology journalism costs more than translated international copy and does not earn the difference back. Webwereld had also been losing ground for years to Tweakers, Hardwareinfo and nu.nl, which were faster and were not owned by an American trade group working from a global template.

~ what got buried with it ~

Twenty-four years of Dutch technology reporting is a primary source for a period nobody else covered from inside. The Dutch dot-com collapse and the privacy fights of the 2010s were both reported in Dutch, for Dutch readers, by people who could telephone the institution involved and get a Dutch answer. Translated international copy does not produce that and was never meant to.

webwereld.nl no longer serves anything in 2026. The domain still exists and the request still gets picked up at the edge, but the machine behind it times out, which is a quieter ending than a redirect. What is left is in the Wayback Machine, in Dutch, with the leak counter running from one to thirty-one.

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