Web Foundation

20 years after the birth of the Internet establishes the inventor of the WWW a Foundation

by Michael Smith

On Sunday, September 14, 2008 the World Wide Web Foundation was founded in Washington, D.C.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1989 was one of people who “invented” the World Wide Web at CERN-Institute, wants with the aid of this foundation to bring the Internet closer to the people and improve it further.

Together with Steve Bratt as CEO and a small team Sir Tim is working on the proper launch of the Web Foundation early in 2009. The John S. und James L. Knight Foundation gave the Web Foundation at the time of its founding a grant of USD 5 Million.

“The Web Foundation will bring together leaders, academics, governments, NGOs and experts to overcome all problems of the Web. The Web Foundation is able, through its unique position, to learn from previous projects and to speed up the further and future development and improvement of the Internet”, said Tim Berners-Lee in his speech,

The aims of the foundation were presented by its founder in a rough outline: an improvement of the Internet as an interconnected, free and open medium and the broadening of all possibilities through the Web.

In his speech Berners-Lee did not only illustrate the problems already overcome, such as convincing CERN to distribute the WWW technologies free of any license, but also to prevent any possible future attempts to make the Internet only accessible against payment or similar license restrictions.

The Web Foundation does not intend to interfere with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the Foundation only wishes to aid the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI).

It is intended to make the Internet more palatable for the ordinary people, as well as more practical and more robust and reliable.

It must be said that some of the reliability issue of the Web is due to issues other than with the Internet per se, I am sure, such as at times inefficient Internet Service Providers. Some issues, yes, are due to the Net itself, such as the fact that there seems to be insufficient capacity there, especially when the US military seems to grab the share that it owns.

© M Smith (Veshengro), September 2008
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