Thirty years ago this month, a young British physician working at a lab near Geneva invented a system for scientists to share information that would ultimately change humanity.
But three decades after he invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee has warned that his creation has been “hijacked by crooks” that may spell its destruction.
Primitive forms of the internet — a network linking computers — had previously existed, but it was the World Wide Web that allowed web pages to be collected and accessed with a browser.In 1990, Belgian scientist Robert Cailliau came onboard to help promote the invention, which used Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, as a standard to create webpages.
But he lamented the “online bullying, fake news, and mass hysteria” that flourish online as well as threats to privacy.– ‘Crooks and trolls’ –At the Web Summit in Lisbon last November, he called for a new “Contract for the Web”, based on access for all and the fundamental right to privacy, among other things.
He called for discussion platforms that connect people with different opinions and backgrounds, contrary to today’s common practice of creating online ghettos, filter bubbles and feedback loops where people rarely encounter opinions different from their own.
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