LONDON — The British inventor of the World Wide Web wants a digital bill of rights to protect Internet users from surveillance.
Speaking on the 25th anniversary of his creation, Tim Berners-Lee says he hopes to spark a global conversation about the need to defend principles that have made the Web successful.
He told the Guardian newspaper that the Web was under increasing attack by governments and corporate interests. He said the system needed an online Magna Carta, or foundation of rules, to protect its openness and neutrality.
Berners-Lee said in a statement Wednesday he believes the Web should be “accessible to all, from any device, and one that empowers all of us to achieve our dignity, rights and potential as humans.”
“In the following quarter-century, the Web has changed the world in ways that I never could have imagined,” he wrote at a website launched to commemorate the web’s creation.
“There have been many exciting advances. It has generated billions of dollars in economic growth, turned data into the gold of the 21st century, unleashed innovation in education and healthcare, whittled away geographic and social boundaries, revolutionised the media, and forced a reinvention of politics in many countries by enabling constant two-way dialogue between the rulers and the ruled.
“There are a few principles which allowed the web, as a platform, to support such growth. By design, the Web is universal, royalty-free, open and decentralised. Thousands of people worked together to build the early Web in an amazing, non-national spirit of collaboration; tens of thousands more invented the applications and services that make it so useful to us today, and there is still room for each one of us to create new things on and through the Web. This is for everyone.”
