Web becoming less free and more unequal: Report

A new report from the World Wide Web Foundation reveals that the web was becoming less free and more unequal with users increasingly subject to state and government surveillance as laws to prevent, or at least circumscribe and control, mass interception of private data and communications were either pathetically weak or did not exist in 84 per cent of the world's countries.

Further, state censorship of access to and the content of websites was also on the increase.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee who, in 1989 whilst working as a software engineer at CERN, the large particle physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland, invented the World Wide Web and launched the World Wide Web Foundation in the autumn of 2009 aimed at improving the quality and availability of the web, globally.

According to the mission statement, the foundation would work to "establish the open Web as a global public good and a basic right, ensuring that everyone can access and use it freely".

The latest edition of the organisation's Web Index measured the contribution the World Wide Web had made to the social, economic and political progress of 86 countries. Further there had also been a focus on whether or not specific websites could be classified as "trustworthy."

Meanwhile, according to new information published by The Web Index, countries were doing far too little to protect women online. 

''Only 30% of the Web Index countries score higher than a five for implementing concrete targets for gender equity in ICT access and use,'' says the study. ''Almost all of them are high-income countries that have already achieved high levels of gender parity in other spheres of life,'' but not on the web.

That was a policy making problem, and the fact that it was not being implemented to protect women online was troublesome, he added.

The Web Index maintained by the World Wide Web Foundation called itself ''the world's first measure of the World Wide Web's contribution to social, economic, and political progress in countries across the world.''

The site focused on aggregating data for web use worldwide and made it available on its website in order to better understand the social effects of the internet. It was easy to navigate and provided some eye-opening information about inequality on economic, social, and political planes.