During the new Ask Me Anything at Reddit with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, it doesn’t seem anyone asked the Web inventor about ISIS using his gift to the world to disseminate decapitation videos. Not that he would have an answer for such atrocities more than anyone else. A hammer can be a tool or a weapon depending on how we swing it, and it’s up to all of us to ensure that things created in good conscience aren’t horribly misused. That won’t be easy with the Internet, which has turned out to be a grand experiment in many things, anarchy and surveillance among them, but we must remain mindful. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What’s the best thing to come from the Internet?

Tim Berners-Lee:

The spirit of global collaboration among all the people working on it.

Question:

You misspelled “cat videos.”

Question:

You misspelled “porn.”

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Question:

With the developments about internet users’ privacy (or lack of) online, what would you recommend we do? Do we stand up to the government, or get around these problems with encryption, etc.?

Tim Berners-Lee:

Great and very important question, with no simple answer. We must work with government to make them accountable when they use our personal data — however they got it. Just a battle of crypto might is not a solution, we also need to change laws and change the structure of government agencies. We need to give the police certain power in exchange for transparency and accountability. And we need to encrypt email and web traffic everywhere, for general security.

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Question:

Do you remember your first thoughts, or words, when you achieved the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server?

Tim Berners-Lee:

Nope. I was head down getting stuff working…. the server and client were both on my machine at that stage… I wasn’t using source code control, so I could not go back and find the critical commit with the “hmm GET seems to work” comment :-)

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Question:

What are your views/thoughts/feelings on net neutrality?

Tim Berners-Lee:

Net neutrality is really important. Basically we do so much cool stuff on top of the network layer, it has to remain an unbiased infrastructure for all our discussion, innovation, etc. I must have the right to be able to communicate with whatever or whoever I want, without discrimination, be it political or commercial.

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Question:

In his 2012 book Cypherpunks, Julian Assange wrote, “the Internet is a threat to human civilization.” He was referring to the great potential for surveillance and control of people. To what degree do you agree with that statement, and what can we do to ensure the Internet of the future supports life, freedom, and autonomy?

Tim Berners-Lee:

“Any powerful tool can be used for good or ill” <– true but we have to make sure on balance good things win. We need to protect against not only governments but criminals too, and viral conspiracy theories which seem to sprout from nowhere. I think that if we the people stand firm in democratic countries and demand that all power over the net taken by government comes with direct accountability to the people in how it is used, then we can indeed have a wonderful civilization. We need to keep it decentralized both technically and socially. We need to protect our rights using both code and law.

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Question:

What do you think about memes?

Tim Berners-Lee:

One does not simply ask the inventor of the WWW what he thinks about memes.

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Question:

Whats your best non-Internet thing that you love?

Tim Berners-Lee:

People.•