Tim Berners-Lee: ‘Stop web’s downward plunge to dysfunctional future’

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Media captionSir Tim Berners-Lee spoke the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones
Global action is required to tackle the web’s “downward plunge to a dysfunctional future”, its inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has told the BBC. In his letter, Sir Tim outlined three specific areas of “dysfunction” that he said were harming the web today:

malicious activity such as hacking and harassment

problematic system design such as business models that reward clickbait

unintended consequences, such as aggressive or polarised discussions

These things could be dealt with, in part, through new laws and systems that limit bad behaviour online, he said. Wandering round the data centre at Cern, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was in a playful mood, remembering how he’d plugged the very first web server into the centre’s uninterruptible power supply over Christmas so that nobody would switch it off – only for the whole place to be powered down.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk