In his call for free Internet access he highlighted the fact that just 20% of the world’s population currently has access to the web, and said that free unfettered access could be instrumental in giving people access to critical services such as healthcare.

“I would like to see people enrolled in a cheap data plan by default. I would like them to get it for free”  Sir Tim said during his speech.  “What about these people who have a signal but are not part of the web, who are not part of the information society?”

He went on to say that people could  ”create their own communities and share their own information” and suggested that network operators could indeed provide free connections on the basis that as people became more affluent, they would be prepared to pay for faster connections.

Dr Hamadoun Toure, the head of the UN’s International telecommunications Union, the United Nations body that oversees international telecoms, agrees with him.  In a recent interview with the BBC he said that free access to information should be a “universal Human right”.

Sir Tim also spoke about net privacy and neutrality, addressing concerns raised over the recent move by Google and others to create a “two-tier” Internet.  

“We assume that when you look up a [web page], that you can get any page because that is the way it has always been and that is why the web has flourished.  Of course a lot of companies would like to limit the pages you get.”  For example, he said, a firm that sells streaming movies may “like to slow down access to other people’s movies”.

Sir Tim has enormous influence and is a person that world leaders will listen to.  How successful his calls for a more open and accessible Internet are remains to be seen.

Someone made an effort to put all of the published Ted Talks in a list with direct onsite links to the videos, the name of the talker, the title, a description, the date, running time and event it was held. This is an incredible useful spreadsheet for anyone interested in at least one of the focus areas of TED.

Below are three embedded Ted Talk videos. The first is by Evan Williams, a founder of Twitter who is talking about how Twitter’s growth was driven by unexpected uses, the second showing Dan Ariely talking about why people are thinking that stealing and cheating is ok (sometimes) and the last by Tim Berners-Lee who is talking about the next web of open, linked data.

The list of TED talks contains 500 entries so far and it seems to be updated regularly with new content. This one is definitely worth keeping an eye on.