Tim Berners-Lee: The internet needs to grow up.

On the thirtieth anniversary of the internet, creator Tim Berners-Lee calls for the world wide web to be taken out of puberty. According to him, the Internet is currently shattering and people need to stop this movement. People need to rely on the power of the Internet again and help make it mature.

According to the site Venture Beat, Berners-Lee told that during a press conference at the CERN in Geneva, where Berners-Lee invented the internet. Thirty years ago, Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to his superior, who thought it was a vague but exciting idea. Now we not only see the great potential of the internet, but the shady sides of the web are also visible.

Power of good?

They all took a step back and suddenly realized after Trump and after the Brexit, that the internet, once considered so cool, doesn’t necessarily serve mankind well, Berners-Lee told journalists present about the way people look at the internet today. It seems that we have not yet recovered from the previous privacy disaster, but are already heading for the next one.

Berners-Lee thus refers to the concerns that exist about social networks and whether they support democracy. According to him, one of the problems is the fact that the Internet is becoming more and more fragmented. Within the United States, the European Union and China, there are different views on the Internet. If these views diverge further, it will be extremely damaging to the Internet as a whole.

Significantly improve

In an open letter Berners-Lee states that many people today feel insecure about whether the Internet is really good or not. But he finds it defeatist to assume that it will not improve in the next thirty years. If we give up today and stop building a better Internet, then the Internet has not failed us, but we have failed the Internet.

It is our journey from digital puberty to a more mature, responsible and inclusive future, says Berners-Lee. Despite today’s concerns, Berners-Lee still has great memories of the birth of the web. His supervisor gave permission to set up a computer model and to see to what extent different computers could work together. But he thought it was a somewhat “vague” idea. However, that vague idea was also “exciting” and led to the creation of the Internet.