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Tim Berners-Lee: World Wide Web Magna Carta By 2015


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The original Magna Carta.

Internet pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee has again called for the creation of a Magna Carta for the Internet.

Credit: leftfootforward.com

World Wide Web founder and inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Wednesday again called for a Magna Carta for the Internet as part of the Web We Want campaign he launched earlier this year.

Concerned about rising corporate influence, government oversight, and mass surveillance, Berners-Lee would like to complete the groundwork for an Internet bill of rights this year. "People have a feeling that they can't trust that the Web will have the properties that we trust in it in the next 25 years, or even in the next three years," he says.

Berners-Lee believes an Internet Magna Carta would help the United Kingdom regain some of the trust lost due to the public's concern about the complicity of British intelligence services in the U.S. National Security Agency surveillance scandal. "What's now in order to re-establish the UK as a place to do business, as a place to store data, is a system that has checks and balances, as the Americans say, that has oversight," he says. "We have to have some sort of oversight to make it accountable to the public in general and to the courts, rather than just the government."

From Computer Weekly (United Kingdom)
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