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Web Pioneer Tim Berners-Lee Supports Net Neutrality

by Amar Toor on March 17, 2011 at 09:18 AM

tim berners-lee
The man who invented the Internet seems pretty worried about the future of net neutrality. During a roundtable discussion in London yesterday, Tim Berners-Lee warned that a two-tiered Internet would threaten the openness upon which the Web has thrived. "Best practices should also include the neutrality of the net," he told a group of representatives from various content companies, including Facebook, Skype and the BBC.

According to Berners-Lee, "every customer should be able to access every service, and every service should be able to access every customer." Plans to divide the Internet into a two-speed highway would seriously jeopardize its growth, he warned. "The web has grown so fast precisely because we have had two independent markets, one for connectivity, and the other for content and applications," Berners-Lee explained.

These sentiments were echoed by Jim Killock, of the UK's Open Rights Group, who was representing consumer interests at the roundtable. "The potential for something going terribly wrong is absolutely there," Killock told the Guardian after the meeting. "The regulator and government do not wish to intervene, for good reason; but industry is not putting forward anything that looks like meaningful self-regulation."

Tags: business, isp, Net Neutrality, NetNeutrality, politics, Tim Berners-Lee, TimBerners-lee, top, uk, Web

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