Governments and companies will 'wait until we're sleeping' then destroy net neutrality, warns Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Stay ever vigilant, advises the father of the World Wide Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has warned that governments and private companies will "wait until we're sleeping" and then destroy net neutrality.

Speaking at the launch of a film he appears in - ForEveryone.net - at a private party at the Sundance Film Festival 2016, Utah, on Monday, Berners-Lee said that while the recent fights for net neutrality have been effective, constant vigilance is still necessary.

"It'll never be done," said Berners-Lee, when asked if and when the job to keep the web fast, efficient and completely accessible will be finished.

"When people did get out on the streets and planned petitions that was good, but the temptation to grab control of the internet by the government or by a company is always going to be there.

"They will wait until we're sleeping, because if you're a government or a company and you can control something, you'll want it," he continued.

"You want to control your citizens or exploit consumers - the temptation is huge. Yes, we can have things enshrined in law, but even then it won't necessarily stop people."

The film, which is directed by Jessica Yu, is one part biography of Berners-Lee and the story of his invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, and one part a call for users of the World Wide Web to stay alert to attempts to divide and rule, such as the EU's controversial October 2015 vote to regulate web content depending on telco data plans.

In the film, Berners-Lee says:

"It's our constitutional right, our human right, to be able to wander round the World Wide Web. Do me a favour, fight for it for me, will you?"

He also states that the internet should be "for everyone, everywhere, for free" before a voiceover says "the clock is ticking and what's closed is closed, and we'll have a web closer to television" - meaning subscription models and content limited by what the customer can afford.

After laying out his warning to the assembled audience, Berners-Lee launched into an impassioned speech about why he vehemently believes in an open web, beginning by pointing out that the world is fast heading to a majority population with web access.

"Because cellphones and smartphones are getting cheap and, in Africa for example, there are more and more people with them, it will be the majority [who can access the internet] soon.

"So that's a huge number of people who can get onto the web, and so when they've managed to do that, then they can access everything we've got: Wikipedia, online coursework, edX. And once they've gone on them, they can figure things out [for themselves], set up blogs, produce things in their own language, and really get on."

But Berners-Lee fears that those just beginning to use the web as a resource for learning in this way will soon begin to hit brick walls in terms of content availability.

"[The web for them could become] like cable TV, and what they've got are a load of irritating, ad-based commercial services to subsidise the phone or the data plan and which give them a skewed view of what's out there. Then they've lost it.

"So we should use [the web] for education, for people finding out about their rights, finding out about gender rights for example, or teenagers finding out about their bodies growing up, and diseases. It's not just about getting on the web."