Yahoo – AFP,
28 Sep 2014
London (AFP) - The British inventor of the World Wide Web warned on Saturday that the freedom of the internet is under threat by governments and corporations interested in controlling the web.
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| British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web, gives a speech on April 18, 2012 in Lyon, central France (AFP Photo/Philippe Desmazes) |
London (AFP) - The British inventor of the World Wide Web warned on Saturday that the freedom of the internet is under threat by governments and corporations interested in controlling the web.
Tim
Berners-Lee, a computer scientist who invented the web 25 years ago, called for
a bill of rights that would guarantee the independence of the internet and
ensure users' privacy.
"If a
company can control your access to the internet, if they can control which
websites they go to, then they have tremendous control over your life,"
Berners-Lee said at the London "Web We Want" festival on the future
of the internet.
"If a
Government can block you going to, for example, the opposition's political
pages, then they can give you a blinkered view of reality to keep themselves in
power."
"Suddenly
the power to abuse the open internet has become so tempting both for government
and big companies."
Berners-Lee,
59, is director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a body which develops
guidelines for the development of the internet.
He called
for an internet version of the "Magna Carta", the 13th century
English charter credited with guaranteeing basic rights and freedoms.
Concerns
over privacy and freedom on the internet have increased in the wake of the
revelation of mass government monitoring of online activity following leaks by
former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
A ruling by
the European Union to allow individuals to ask search engines such as Google to
remove links to information about them, called the "right to be
forgotten", has also raised concerns over the potential for censorship.
"There
have been lots of times that it has been abused, so now the Magna Carta is
about saying...I want a web where I'm not spied on, where there's no
censorship," Berners-Lee said.
The
scientist added that in order to be a "neutral medium", the internet
had to reflect all of humanity, including "some ghastly stuff".
"Now
some things are of course just illegal, child pornography, fraud, telling
someone how to rob a bank, that's illegal before the web and it's illegal after
the web," Berners-Lee added.
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