Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has said the dominance of internet giants is a “fad” that does not have to endure, adding that urgent change was needed to improve a digital divide in young people’s online access.<\/p>\n
Berners-Lee, who invented the internet navigation system known as the World Wide Web in 1989, said he sensed “a feeling out there of restlessness, a feeling that we need to tip things over to change them”.<\/p>\n
High-profile incidents such as a dispute between Facebook and Australia that led to the social network blocking news feeds in the country has led many citizens and governments to re-examine their relationships with giant internet and social media companies.<\/p>\n
“I’m optimistic, because we’ve seen some dominant fads on the internet before … and then things change,” he said in an interview with Reuters, adding that people were pushing back against the use and abuse of personal data.<\/p>\n
“(There’s) great awareness that things need to change.”<\/p>\n
He said that a combination of government policy and tech could work together and help people regain control over their data and online lives.<\/p>\n
Berners-Lee, 65, is working on a project called Solid, where people’s personal data is controlled by the user, rather than platforms like Facebook.<\/p>\n
But in a letter to coincide with the 32nd birthday of the World Wide Web, he warned of a growing digital divide which he said could threaten the chances of many young people, with one in three people aged between 15-24 globally having no access to the internet at all.<\/p>\n
He said recognising the internet as a basic right, akin to how electricity was seen last century, was vital, especially in a world that is increasingly shaped by those with web access.<\/p>\n
“The only sane thing to think is that … things are going to accelerate (and) continue to accelerate,” he told Reuters. “We’re going through another step-change in the speed at which the world is changing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has said the dominance of internet giants is a “fad” that does not have to endure, adding that urgent change was needed to improve a digital divide in young people’s online access. Berners-Lee, who invented the internet navigation system known as the World Wide Web in 1989, said he sensed “a feeling out there of restlessness, a feeling that we need to tip things over to change them”. High-profile incidents such as a dispute between Facebook and Australia that led to the social network blocking news feeds in the country has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-798149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798149\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}