Tim Berners-Lee calls for Free Internet Everywhere
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has used a speech at a Nokia conference in London to call for everybody worldwide to get free Internet access and at least a low bandwidth connection "by default", as reported by the BBC.
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.
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.