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Twenty years ago in December 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and launched a digital revolution. Now Berners-Lee is worried that threats to open standards and Net Neutrality are reaching critical mass if Web users don’t do something about it.
“Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web,” he said. “Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments — totalitarian and democratic alike — are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.”
The Web is how we communicate with one another, it’s vital to democracy, science and understanding our world.
“If we want to track what government is doing, see what companies are doing, understand the true state of the planet, find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease,” Berners-Lee explains, “not to mention easily share our photos with our friends, we the public, the scientific community and the press must make sure the Web’s principles remain intact–not just to preserve what we have gained but to benefit from the great advances that are still to come.”
