Participants walk inside the Congress Centre during the 43rd Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, yesterday.
DAVOS: The inventor of the World Wide Web warned that government control is limiting the possibilities of the Internet, as dozens of countries and businesses signed a cyber-security deal at the Davos forum.
The comments by Tim Berners-Lee at the World Economic Forum plugged into a wider debate among the delegates on the future of the Internet, particularly how to balance openness with privacy and security.
While Yahoo!’s chief Marissa Mayer told the forum there was a “trade off” between privacy and the benefits of increasingly personalised services offered by Internet giants, the network’s founding father took up the ethical issues at stake.
“The dream is of a more open web,” Berners-Lee told the gathering, citing social media as a way of breaking down barriers. But he said the recent suicide of Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old US Internet activist who faced charges of illegally copying and distributing millions of academic articles, highlighted government efforts to police the Internet.
“He downloaded a lot and so the secret service in the US decided that he was a hacker. For them that isn’t the term of great praise that it is when I use it. For me a hacker is someone who is creative and does wonderful things,” he said.
Berners-Lee — who launched the first web page on Christmas Day 1990 and is is credited with creating the World Wide Web — called on international governments to release more data, saying that others could use it to find solutions to problems including economic and health issues.
“They can give you 101 reasons for not doing it but it comes down to control,” the Briton said.
But Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer had a different take when it came to data about individual users held by companies such as hers and by other Internet giants such as Facebook and Google.
“I think that privacy will always be something that users should consider. But I also think that privacy is a trade off,” she said. “Because where you give that personal information you get functionality in return.”
Mayer, 37, who took over in July at Yahoo! after 13 years at Google in a move aimed at reinvigorating the faded Internet firm, said the future lay in the increased “personalisation” of the web. She predicted the dominance in coming years of handheld Internet devices to take personalised content.
“It’s really important if you look at what’s happening in terms of the shift to mobile,” she said, saying that the number of tablets and smartphones had tripled in five years and that tablets would outsell laptops this year.
But she added: “The real question is making money from it.”
For government leaders at Davos the topic was about how to harness the power of the Internet to boost the global economy — while also maintaining security against fraud and terrorism.
British cybersecurity minister Francis Maude said a “safe and secure” Internet was necessary to help business thrive. Cyber security is a shared, global challenge — our companies operate in a global marketplace. The cyber threat knows no geographical boundaries and it matters that those we connect to are secure as well.”
AFP
