You are not seriously claiming 1000s of smart people wouldn't have had anything useful to do? What would have happened if LHC funding didn't go through? I am quite sure the people involved had other plans, not just the people directly involved but also all the people working for companies that supply to LHC.

As for HTML, why not invert that idea? Perhaps without CERN it would have been invented earlier... The point is that there is so little relationship between CERN's activities and HTML that it seems too strong to claim that without CERN, the WWW would have taken 5 years more.

After all, the Web depends not not just on HTML, but on a whole lot of interdependent technologies, both in hardware and software, that were growing in the 80's.