Internet is 30 years old and its creator has issued a serious warning about the future of the network – 03/12/2019

On March 12, 1989, the English scientist Tim Berners-Lee He sent to Geneva, Switzerland, his head of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known by his acronym CERN), a protocol which would be the starting point for creating the internet, with the initial goal of scientists sharing information with universities and other institutions around the world.

In commemoration of the 30th anniversary, his creator reflected on the role he plays in society and on what happened, highlighting the challenges that governments and society in general face in "making the web accessible to all" in the face of the digital divide and other risks.

In an interview with the British BBC, Berners-Lee noted that the public had confirmed that their data could be "manipulated" after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when this British company had collected confidential information from millions of dollars. Facebook users campaign Republican Donald Trump in the US presidential elections.

"I am very concerned about the indecency and the spread of misinformation. When the Cambridge Analytica case was discovered, people understood that the elections could be manipulated using data provided by themselves, "added Berners-Lee.

In addition, the inventor published an open letter indicating three areas that threaten the Web today, focusing on malicious activities such as hacking and harbadment, in business models that reward clickbait and in polarized and aggressive discussions.

According to the creator, these problems could be slowed down through new laws and systems that limit behavior in the network.

"We need web-based cooperation with the government, the civilian population and elected officials who make decisions and act when private sector interests threaten public goods," he said.

After its creation, the "network of networks" brought together achievements; in 1990, CERN launched the first Web site running on the first server, created by Tim Berners-Lee himself, the NeXT; In 1997, the wifi protocol was invented and in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google. Then, in 2004, Facebook was born. In 2005, the first video was uploaded to YouTube. In 2006, the first tweet was published. So until 2016, when global Internet traffic reached 1 Zetta byte.

Today, more than half of the world's population has an Internet connection, Facebook has 2.2 billion active users and Twitter has more than 300 million users.

(Source: agencies)