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By Sally Watson, 27 September 2001 16:00

NEWS 'Father of the web' Tim Berners-Lee has expressed his concern about a backlash against the internet in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks. During a visit to his former university, Oxford, Berners-Lee expressed his deep regret at the terrorist actions but warned it would be too easy to blame web communications and try to impose limitations on their use. "The most important thing about the web is universality," he said. "I'm more worried about the backlash where people try to close things down, or the government tries to impose regulation. "Given that it is possible to encrypt things which would be impossible to unencrypt, it's tempting for people who don't understand cryptography to assume that taking control of the network will solve all their problems," he said. Now a professor at MIT and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Berners-Lee created the first hypertext protocols while working at the CERN research laboratory in Switzerland. At the time of the attacks on 11 September, Berners-Lee was in Boston, and he praised the reliability of the web for allowing him and his colleagues to contact friends and family within minutes. "The tragedy was huge," he said. "But also wonderful things have happened. It's a bit like paper, you get bad uses and good uses." Watch silicon.com's interview with Tim Berners-Lee:
'Father of the web' defends the commercial net
http://www.silicon.com/a39731