The future of the Web: from physics to fundamental right
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Tim Berners-Lee (left) and Gordon Brown discuss the future of the Web in front of an audience at the University of Geneva. Photo by Felipe Fink Grael.
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Countless scientific tools have made their way from the lab bench to everyday life. But perhaps none have been more pervasive than the World Wide Web. Developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 as a way to manage project information at the laboratory, the Web has since infiltrated the globe and affected the way we communicate, educate, entertain, inform and govern.
Twenty years after the technology became a publicly available service, the future of the Web remains a widely debated topic. This past Wednesday, Berners-Lee and former United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown discussed their views on the subject at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. They focused specifically on making the Web available to the communities and demographics around the world that remain unconnected.
“Access to the Web should absolutely be a fundamental right,” Berners-Lee said. Following the civil rights movements for women, African Americans and the LGBT community, “the right to connectivity is the timely thing to fight for,” he said. “But even if we get those rights on paper and there is still no access, we lose.”
A large effort by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, led by Berners-Lee, aims to provide Web access to sub-Saharan Africa. Although many places lack proper infrastructure and the cost of broadband is prohibitively high, many Africans have access to mobile phones. Brown pointed out that Web access through mobile phones could enable better education, foster communication between doctors and HIV patients, or provide market information to farmers about the price of crops.
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