Internet inventor wants a "Magna Carta" to safeguard net from governments, corporations

29 Sep 2014

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Tim Berners-LeeInventor of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee claims the world's internet freedom is under threat by governments and corporations that do not have the interests of the public at heart and has called for a bill of rights  to ensure users' privacy, IT Pro reported.

He added the organisations were tempted to abuse the open internet and the issue had come to light after former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked information suggesting the government was snooping on US citizens.

Berners-Lee said at the Web We Want festival, "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.

"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.''

He went on to explain that a number of activities such as "child pornography, fraud, telling someone how to rob a bank," were illegal before the internet existed and would always be against the law, however, guidelines needed to state that no one was spied on and censorship should not exist where the internet was concerned.

Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, an organisation that makes the rules and guidelines for the development of the internet.

He called for a version of the "Magna Carta" for the internet, a 13th century English document that has since the centuries safeguarded the rights and freedoms of the English people.

Privacy and freedom concerns on the internet had increased following former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaking the US' massive monitoring of online activity.

The EU's "right to be forgotten" ruling, under which members of the public can remove links to their information on search engines such as Google, had also raised concerns over the possibility of censorship.

Berners-Lee said there had been lots of times that it had been abused, so now the Magna Carta was about saying...I want a web where I'm not spied on, where there's no censorship.

He added further that for the internet to be a "neutral medium," it needed to reflect all of humanity, even some of the "ghastly stuff" in the world.

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