The World Wide Web is in peril. Its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, has called for an agenda to save it from misuse. The threat to the Web is not only from hijackers and powerhungry governments but from the tech giants themselves. Here is an indepth analysis.
When Tim Berners-Lee released in 1991 the first Web page he had invented, he envisaged it not as a tool for research on the Internet, but as a new way of thinking and a means to greater freedom and social growth than was ever possible. He founded, together with Rosemary Leith, the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF) as a non-profit organisation and did not derive any financial benefit from it.
The origin and development of the Web and the Internet show that it belongs to no one country or company and is designed to be open and free to all of humankind. Today, Berners-Lee is a worried man. In an open letter in The New York Times, he admits that the Web has been....
