Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee calls for drastic changes to the internet amid concerns over data privacy, hacking, misinformation
- Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Foundation are advocating for a universal online social contract
- He envisions this initiative as evolving into something like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The World Wide Web, the global hyperlinked system that helped expand and transform the internet, turns 30 this year. Once the province of geeks and techies, the internet has become such a significant part of peoples’ lives, thanks to the information management structure first proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in March 1989.
But Berners-Lee, who successfully implemented that online communications system in November the same year, looks at the current state of cyberspace with both satisfaction and alarm.
While he loves the broad accessibility of information, knowledge and universal values on the internet, the 63-year-old British computer scientist is worried about a weaponised cyberspace used by governments and various unsavoury groups to carry out hacking and manipulation of elections; the dominance of powerful commercial interests to exploit the internet and people’s private data; and the spread of criminal and antisocial behaviour, including hate speech and misinformation.
“You can’t turn off the internet, so we have to change a few things about it,” Berners-Lee said in an interview with the South China Morning Post.
Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Foundation – an organisation he founded nine years ago – are now advocating for a new social contract for the web. This would provide general guidelines and principles for good citizenship involving governments, corporations and individuals.