Free Republic

Tim Berners-Lee, a British engineer credited with having invented the World Wide Web in 1989, has released an ambitious plan detailing steps for better online governance, addressing problems like misinformation, data surveillance and censorship. The Contract for the Web was created by Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation in cooperation with representatives from governments, companies and civil society to “keep knowledge freely available,” while strengthening laws, regulations and companies “to ensure pursuit of profit is not at the expense of human rights and democracy.” The plan is backed by more than 150 organizations, including internet giants like Google, Microsoft and Facebook,...

Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web With an ambitious decentralized platform, the father of the web hopes it’s game on for corporate tech giants like Facebook and Google.

This week, Berners-Lee will launch Inrupt, a startup that he has been building, in stealth mode, for the past nine months. Backed by Glasswing Ventures, its mission is to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it. In other words, it’s game on for Facebook, Google, Amazon. For years now, Berners-Lee and other internet activists have been dreaming of a digital utopia where individuals control their own data and the internet remains free and open. But for Berners-Lee, the time for...

This week, Berners-Lee will launch, Inrupt, a startup that he has been building... its mission is to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it.

The World Wide Web needs a complete rethink to prevent spying and the spread of "nasty, mean ideas" on social media websites, its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, said on Monday. Berners-Lee, a London-born computer scientist who invented the Web as a platform on top of the internet in 1989, said his intention in building it had been for the public to "do good stuff" and share ideas among each other, as was the case with websites such as Wikipedia. Instead, negative ideas were proliferating on social media sites in particular, he said, while privacy was also being compromised by online spying....

Sir Tim Berners-Lee Admits Forward Slashes On World Wide Web ‘Were A Mistake’ Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist who created the World Wide Web, has admitted his decision to include two forward slashes in internet addresses was a mistake. Andrew Hough 14 Oct 2009 Sir Tim said if he had his time over again he would not include the two forward slashes in web browsers. Photo: GEOFF PUGH The // at the front of a web address was pointless and unnecessary, Sir Tim admitted at a recent talk in America. Sir Tim, now director of the World Wide Web...

* Governments, corporations snooping on website visits... * Next big thing on Web is linked data...* Berners-Lee says future of Web is on mobile phones Surfers on the Internet are at increasing risk from governments and corporations tracking the sites they visit to build up a picture of their activities, the founder of the World Wide Web said on Friday. Tim Berners-Lee, whose proposal for an information management system at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research CERN 20 years ago led eventually to the World Wide Web, said tracking website visits in this way could build an incredibly detailed profile...

<p>It all began 20 years ago today with a frustrated 29-year-old programmer who had a passion for order.</p> <p>Tim Berners-Lee, now famous as the founder of the World Wide Web, was working as an obscure consultant at Cern, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in the suburbs of Geneva. Berners-Lee loved the laboratory. It was full of stimulating projects and creative people, but his work, and the work of his colleagues, was stymied by the lack of institutional knowledge.</p>

The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science, says the creator of the World Wide Web. Talking to BBC News Sir Tim Berners-Lee said he was increasingly worried about the way the web has been used to spread disinformation. Sir Tim was speaking in advance of an announcement about a Foundation he has helped create that he hopes will improve the World Wide Web. Sir Tim talked to the BBC in the week in which Cern, where he did his pioneering work on the web, turned on the Large Hadron Collider for the first time....

"Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind." — Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web Last week, Playboy Enterprises, Inc. teamed with a Toronto-based specialist in gambling software to announce the launch later this year of the first Playboy-branded online poker website. CryptoLogic Inc.'s president, Lewis Rose, lauded Playboy as "one of the world's premier entertainment brands." And Christie Hefner, CEO of Playboy, blew an air kiss Rose's way, heaping praise on his firm's "technical and industry strength." In the United...

The World Wide Web is the most democratic mass medium there has ever been. Freedom of the press, as the saying goes, belongs only to those who own one. Radio and television are controlled by those rich enough to buy a broadcast license. But anyone with an Internet-connected computer can reach out to a potential audience of billions. This democratic Web did not just happen. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who invented the Web in 1989, envisioned a platform on which everyone in the world could communicate on an equal basis. But his vision is being threatened by...

CHICAGO, Dec. 28 (UPI) -- Fifteen years ago this Christmas week, Tim Berners-Lee, an obscure scientist working in a European laboratory, invented the Internet browser, now a fixture of the digital economy, experts tell United Press International's The Web. Sir Berners-Lee today still lives a simple professor's lifestyle, bicycling around town, as his browser was supplanted by the Mosaic browser developed by a college student, Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois, a few years later. Andreessen's invention led to the creation of Netscape, the Netscape Navigator and other technologies that enervated to the go-go 1990s run in investment in...

NEW YORK - World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee has started a blog just in time for the 15th anniversary of his invention. In his first entry, Berners-Lee remarked on how the Web took off as a publishing medium rather than one in which visitors not only read but also contributed information. "WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discource through communal authorship," he wrote. That has changed lately with the growing popularity of blogs, which are online diaries that often let visitors submit comments, and wikis, which are sites...

22 August 2005 By Hand and on the Web at http://www.w3.org/2005/08/22-w3c-prereg-standards-comments.html Office of the General Counsel U.S. Copyright Office James Madison Memorial Building, Room LM-401 101 Independence Avenue, SE., Washington, DC 20559-6000 In Re: 37 CFR Part 202 [Docket No. RM 2005-9] The United States Copyright Office has requested [1] comment on whether a requirement that certain online forms be submitted only through the use of a single vendor's World Wide Web browser, to the exclusion of any other hardware or software product or service designed to conform with Web standards. Such a policy, even if implemented for a short...

TIM Berners-Lee, the man who invented and then gave away the World Wide Web, was picked today as epitomising the Greatest of Britishness – a quality finance minister Gordon Brown said was unique. His selfless act added to modesty and ingenuity were deemed by a panel of judges to make Berners-Lee the Greatest Briton of 2004 in the first of what organisers said they hoped would become an annual event. Mr Brown, who opened the glittering award ceremony, said Britons were a wonderful people and invoked the bulldog spirit of World War II leader Winston Churchill – which he said...

Creator of the web turns knight Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the world wide web, has received his knighthood from the Queen. The "father of the web", who already has an OBE, went to Buckingham Palace to get his reward for "services to the global development of the internet". In 1991, the knight of the web came up with a system to organise, link and browse pages on the net. Famously modest, he said he had just been "in the right place at the right time" and did not want his photo taken. During the hour-long ceremony held in...

LONDON (AP) - The father of the World Wide Web was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and said his revolutionary invention was the result of being in the right place at the right time. "I suppose it's amazing when you think how many things people get involved in that don't work. It's very heartening that this one actually did," said Tim Berners-Lee, who was accompanied to the Buckingham Palace investiture by his wife and two children on Friday. But he added: "I'm very aware I was in the right place at the right time." While working at CERN, the European...

No, not Al Gore: Real internet inventor wins million dollar prize Tim Berners-Lee lauded, rewarded for decision not to commercialize or patent his contributions to the internet technologies he developed: "If I had tried to demand fees ... there would be no World Wide Web" | by AP HELSINKI, Finland (AP) Tim Berners-Lee, who received a $1.2 million cash prize Tuesday for creating the World Wide Web, says he would never have succeeded if he had charged money for his inventions. "If I had tried to demand fees ... there would be no World Wide Web," Berners-Lee, 49, said...

The man who invented the World Wide Web is finally to get some payment for having done so. Although many scientists were involved with the development of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee was the one who came up with the idea of the World Wide Web, says the Daily Mail. However because he insisted it should not be patented, so everyone could have free access to it, so far he has missed out on the kind of fortunes that have come to some dotcom millionaires. Now Briton Berners-Lee, who lives in America, is to receive the world's largest science prize, the...

The man who invented the World Wide Web is finally to get some payment for having done so. Although many scientists were involved with the development of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee was the one who came up with the idea of the World Wide Web, says the Daily Mail. However because he insisted it should not be patented, so everyone could have free access to it, so far he has missed out on the kind of fortunes that have come to some dotcom millionaires. Now Briton Berners-Lee, who lives in America, is to receive the world's largest science prize, the...