Source: hindustantimes | Image Courtesy: guim
In Web We Want Festival, Tim Berners-Lee, best known as the inventor World Wide Web said that the consumers should say no to initiatives such as Facebook’s Free Basics as such programs are not the full internet .
As reported by the Guardian, the Web We Want campaign endorses five key principles for the future of the web:
- Freedom of expression online and offline.
- Affordable internet access.
- Protection of user data and privacy.
- A decentralized internet infrastructure.
- Net neutrality.
While referring to net neutrality, he said that it is no when it comes to compromising on it.
In an interview to the Guardian, he was quoted:
“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.”
Free Basics is an initiative by Facebook that aims to provide free access to a limited section of internet to the billion people online. Critics have put their view that this goes against the concept of net neutrality, which is against any priority being given to an entity in the traffic flow because of payments to service providers such as telecom companies.
