MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Inventor of the Web says WWW is a fundamental right for a democracy

Sir Tim Berners-Lee: a working democracy needs an informed electorate

The World Wide Web is becoming as important to the future of mankind as free speech, the inventor of the Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said. Because the network is neutral and access to data open, the Web is becoming a vital tool to ensure open government, and as such it should be considered a right.

“I think obviously there are more fundamental ones” Berners-Lee told the BBC, “but within a democratic society if the democracy is going to work you have to have an informed electorate.”

As the Web has grown in global power and influence, so Berners-Lee has taken greater interest in its influence on humanity for good. In 2009 he became a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, an organization devoted to funding and coordinating efforts to further the web's beneficial impact, and in the same year he became a founding Director of the Web Science Trust. This has been established to promote education and research into humanity's developing relationship with technology, an area of study now known as Web Science.

Berners-Lee is also works as an advisor to data.gov.uk, a project to provide open access to public sector information. Securing this access he says has the potential to bring enormous influence to bear politically because it promotes informed decision-making, not least by investors.

“The openness of governments is one of the things which makes investors decide whether of not to invest,” he said. “When you make the government open, when you can see what's happening, they're much more likely to bring their money and companies into your country.”

Many groups around the world are now using open public data to hold public bodies to account. In Brazil a website that tracks the published wealth of politicians has created many political casualties.

Journalist Fernando Rodrigues built the online database Politicos do Brazil which contains details of the campaign finances of 400,000 politicians.
The site was started in 2000, but as the information becomes more complete, its power increases.

He told the BBC that he believed it had contributed to the removal from office of hundreds of politicians after the 2008 local elections.

“Only six months after the election, 343 mayors and legislators had already lost their jobs because so much data was available about them and it became easy to identify wrongdoings during the electoral process,” he said.

Other countries are less forthcoming with publication of data, but allow their citizens to access it in other ways.

In India, for example, the 2005 Right to Information Act has been met with great enthusiasm. So far, around two million requests for information have been made.

Yamini Aiyar, director of the accountability initiative at the country's Centre for Policy Research, said that the Indian public has a strong sense of ownership about the act.

“People are monitoring the act, looking out for it constantly, questioning the government,” he told the BBC. “That kind of public ownership is the biggest lesson I think India can give to the world.”