The founder of the World Wide Web has condemned Google and Facebook for allowing the internet to become the “world’s largest surveillance network”. Sir Tim Berners-Lee warned that the internet has fallen into the hands of large greedy corporations and Orwellian governments who are abusing the power of the web for their own gain. Theinquirer.net reports: “It controls what people see. It creates mechanisms for how people interact. It’s been great, but spying, blocking sites, repurposing people’s content, taking you to the wrong websites completely undermines the spirit of helping people create,” he said. “The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for microblogging.” Berners-Lee met a group of internet activists this week, including Brewster Kahle, head of the Internet Archive, and fellow internet pioneer Vint Cerf, in San Francisco at the Decentralized Web Summit to discuss ways of “re-decentralising” the internet, giving more control to individuals and ensuring more privacy and security. It is a subject that he has returned to time and again. Berners-Lee attended the launch of the documentary ForEveryone.net at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and talked about the importance of defending net neutrality in an age when technology [...]
