Tim Berners-Lee's Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, warned that social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Friendster constitute one of "several threats to the Web's universality," arguing that such sites create "closed silos of content" that may threaten the Internet's status as a "single, universal information space."
In the article below, titled 'Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality', published in the journal Scientific American, Berners-Lee outlined why the Web is threatened in several ways.
"The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending"
The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer. The simple setup demonstrated a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere. In this spirit, the Web spread quickly from the grassroots up. Today, at its 20th anniversary, the Web is thoroughly integrated into our daily lives. We take it for granted, expecting it to “be there” at any instant, like electricity.
The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.
The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.
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Interview with Timothy J. Berners-Lee
3Com Founders Professor of Engineering
Director, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
3 Com Founders Researcher
MacArthur Fellow
MIT 150 : infinite history