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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