Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has urged Britons to fight the government’s plans to extend the country’s surveillance powers, and act as a worldwide leader for promoting good governance on the web.



Berners-Lee said Britain had “lost the moral leadership” on privacy and surveillance, following the revelations of the former National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden.

Speaking before the Web We Want Festival in London’s Southbank Centre, which starts on Saturday, Berners-Lee expressed concern about the UK government’s decision to reintroduce a beefed-up version of the “snooper’s charter”.

In an unexpected move announced in the Queen’s Speech earlier this week, the government is to introduce an investigatory powers bill far more wide-ranging than expected. The legislation will include not only the expected snooper’s charter, enabling the tracking of everyone’s web and social media use, but also moves to strengthen the security services’ warranted powers for the bulk interception of the content of communications.



“The discussion [in the Queen’s Speech] of increased monitoring powers is something which is a red flag … this discussion is a global one, it’s a big one, it’s something that people are very engaged with, they think it’s very important, and they’re right, because it is very important for democracy, and it’s very important for business.



“So this sort of debate is something that should be allowed to happen around legislation. It’s really important that legislation is left out for a seriously long comment period,” and not simply rushed through into law.

Berners-Lee also warned about attempts to improve internet access around the world by offering cut-down versions of the web, such as Facebook’s Internet.org project. Users should “just say no” to such proposals, he insisted.

On the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, Berners-Lee and the Web We Want festival have convened to produce a Magna Carta for the 21st century. But while the document is intended to inspire change globally, Berners-Lee bemoaned the loss of Britain’s “moral high ground”, following the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013.

“It has lost a lot of that moral high ground, when people saw that GCHQ was doing things that even the Americans weren’t,” Berners-Lee said. “So now I think, if Britain is going to establish a leadership situation, it’s going to need to say: ‘We have solid rules of privacy, which you as an individual can be assured of, and that you as a company can be assured of.’”

That way, he said, “if you want to start a company in Britain, then you can offer privacy to your users, because you’ll know that our police force won’t be demanding the contents of your discs willy-nilly, they’ll only be doing so under a very well defined and fairly extreme set of circumstances.”

He accepts it was an uphill battle to get people in Britain to care, however. “This is a wild generalisation, but traditionally, people in the US are brought up in kindergarten to learn to distrust the government. That’s what the constitution’s for. Whereas people in the UK are brought up more to trust the government by default, and distrust corporations. People in America tend not to have a natural distrust of large corporations.

“So that seems to be where people are coming from. In the light of that, it’s not so surprising that UK folks tended to feel more comfortable with government surveillance - but they also feel less comfortable with surveillance by corporations.”

Just say no

The Web We Want campaign is promoting five key principles for the future of the web: Freedom of expression online and offline, affordable access to the net, protection of user data and privacy, a decentralised and open infrastructure, and net neutrality.

But the campaign is insistent that the five principles are a minimum starting point, and that compromise on those points is not helpful to the goal. That puts it in conflict with more than just the usual suspects. When asked about Internet.org, Facebook’s non-profit organisation that aims to extend access to a few select websites in the developing world, Berners-Lee said people should “just say no” to the project.

When it comes to compromising on net neutrality, “I tend to say ‘just say no’,” he said.

“In the particular case of somebody who’s offering … something which is branded internet, it’s not internet, then you just say no. No it isn’t free, no it isn’t in the public domain, there are other ways of reducing the price of internet connectivity and giving something … [only] giving people data connectivity to part of the network deliberately, I think is a step backwards.”