Web founder Tim Berners-Lee wants an online bill of rights

Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the web (sidebar: that was 25 years ago, can you believe it?!), wants to ensure that the internet is free from government (or corporate) intrusion.

Speaking at the Web We Want festival in London at the weekend, he said that we need to ensure that our internet freedoms aren’t stripped away by governments or private companies. Instead, as The Guardian reports, he called for an online version of the Magna Carta, the first English document that granted rights to citizens (waaaay back in 1215).

In his role as director of the World Wide Web Consortium, an international community working to improve web standards (in everything from accessibility to privacy), he’s increasingly concerned about developments like the ‘right to be forgotten’ by Google, and revelations of the scope of the NSA and the UK government’s data collection.

He wants users’ privacy to be guaranteed and for the internet to remain independent and not controlled by politicians or corporate interests, who could censor things they don’t want us to see, thus manipulating our view of the world. ‘I want a web where I’m not spied on, where there’s no censorship,’ he said. That’s hard to argue with – but good luck getting China on board.

By cellanr, via Wikimedia Commons.

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