On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee distributed a proposal for the creation of a new system for the distribution of information, a web of notes with links between them. This was the original concept of the World Wide Web. On this anniversary, its creator calls for the creation of a Magna Carta for the web, the equivalent of one of the basic documents for British democracy to protect the freedom of the people from surveillance.

Tim Berners-Lee’s draft proposal was developed and on November 12, 1990 that led to a formal proposal for the hypertext project then called “WorldWideWeb”. For this reason, in 2010 I celebrated the 20th anniversary of the web but it’s a formality, so much so that in the article I wrote I mentioned other key dates for this project.

For example, the fact that on April 30, 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free for all, with no license cost for the use of its protocols is a milestone in history. If we’d been required to pay any license, how would have the web evolved? Would it have had the same extraordinary development? At what cost?

Anyway, today Tim Berners-Lee himself remembers March 12, 1989 as the anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web and a website to celebrate the project was created. There’s also a video message from him in which the creator of the web also talks about the current big problem, the espionage users are victims of.

The recent initiative that invited users to revolt against an authoritarian turn of the web has allowed us to collect some information about the espionage carried out primarily by the NSA but also by the intelligence services of other nations. Tim Berners-Lee defends net freedom and today and calls for a formal definition of the people’s rights on the Internet against the surveillance that threatens the democratic nature of the web.

From the days when the first web server (photo ©Coolcaesar) was put into operation the World Wide Web evolved in a way that not even Tim Berners-Lee envisioned. Thanks to it, we can connect directly to people of all nations, and we can get to know them bypassing any form of propaganda and prejudice. Not surprisingly, in dictatorships the Internet is strictly controlled and filtered and can even be turned off if the authorities decide it.

If we want the web to keep on being developed in a democratic way continuing to be an instrument of freedom, we must demand that the rights of its members are recognized. The majority of Earth’s inhabitants still don’t have access to the Internet and this is another problem. Many people use the Internet for fun, others for work or otherwise for practical reasons. In all cases, if we want to keep on using it without heavy restrictions and controls we must work and be the ones who control the decisions taken at the political level by people often ignorant in the field who may have other agendas.