Web creator calls for online ‘Bill of Rights’

On Wednesday, on the 25th birthday of the
World Wide Web, the man who brought us www and created the concept of a global system
of interlinked online pages, Tim Berners-Lee, issued a call for a “Bill
of Rights” for all Internet users across the globe.

Here’s how The Spectator reported the story:

“At present, every web user has the same access to every
service, every website at the same speed. But proposals for a multi-tiered
system won’t go away — this report from BuzzFeed last year gives a good account of how the
land currently lies. To combat this threat, Tim Berners-Lee has seized upon
today’s anniversary, telling the Guardian that we need ‘an online Magna Carta’ – a
‘bill of rights’ to ensure that the open and free principles remain intact:

“Unless we have an open, neutral Internet we can rely
on without worrying about what’s happening at the back door, we can’t have open
government, good democracy, good healthcare, connected communities and
diversity of culture. It’s not naive to think we can have that, but it is naive
to think we can just sit back and get it.”

“An online bill of rights could also address the
other great concern — privacy and government snooping. The Guardian’s excellent expose of the NSA’s worst
practices has
revealed that it’s possible to infringe people’s rights online with minimal
fuss. Berners-Lee thinks that something needs to be done:

“These issues have crept up on us. Our rights are
being infringed more and more on every side, and the danger is that we get used
to it. So I want to use the 25th anniversary for us all to do that, to take the
web back into our own hands and define the web we want for the next 25 years.”