We're living in a world where Internet access should be as readily available as water, according to the man who helped create the web, Tim Berners-Lee.
Berners-Lee, who made his comments at an MIT symposium on "Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything," noted that people have become so reliant on the web that it should be a right to have access to it, as reported by Network World.
"Access to the Web is now a human right," he said. "It's possible to live without the Web. It's not possible to live without water. But if you've got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger."
He also noted that the Internet should be stopped from becoming a petri dish for rumors, and from fomenting conspiracy theories. Part of the problem is the size of the Internet--the number of web pages compares favorably with the number of neurons in the human brain. But the Internet can be controlled to an extent the brain cannot.
"To a certain extent, we have a duty about the web which is greater than our duty about the brain, because with the brain we just analyze it," he said. "But with the web, we actually get to engineer it. We can change it."