Tim Berners-Lee: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

"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 [established by Berners-Lee so that stakeholders could work together in open groups to build a better web than any company could build by itself], to expand its capabilities based on those principles." But, in spreading from the grassroots up, his invention has arguably lost many of the egalitarian principles Berners-Lee hoped for. It has become less straightforwardly a force for good. Earlier this month, Charles Leadbeater, former policy adviser to the Labour government and a champion of the web's potential to give power to hitherto deprived groups, published a report called A Better Web for the Nominet Trust pointing to the pervasive misogyny of the web as an example of how the democratising potential of the internet has not been fulfilled. "There is some sense in which the internet is in danger of not meeting its potential," says Leadbeater, "the promise that was there in the mid-2000s, which was about collaborating to create better ways to do things." That promise was something Leadbeater and other Pollyanna-ish proselytisers for the web only a few years ago believed would be realised. In 2008, he published a book called We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production; at the same time in the US, fellow web evangelist Clay Shirky published Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Both stressed the internet's genesis in 60s counterculture and its historic ethos of sticking it to the Man. Both revelled in the fact that new web-based social tools helped single mothers looking online for social networks or pro-democracy campaigners in Belarus. When I reviewed these books for the Guardian at the time, I worried that neither sufficiently realised that these tools and this rhetoric could just as readily be co-opted by the Man (by which I meant profit-based organisations and overbearing governments). But arguably that is precisely what has been happening in the intervening period. "We've had a year now in which the internet is regarded with a sort of weary cynicism by a lot of people, because Facebook are just locking you in, and others are using your data without you knowing it. Some people are enthusiastic about that, because they get really good services and they love it, but quite a lot of other people are either quite doubtful or outright sceptical," says Leadbeater. Sceptical is right. The world wide web has increasingly facilitated the global spread of misogyny, the hate crime of revenge porn, corporate and state surveillance, bullying, racism, the life-ruining, time-wasting, Sisyphean digital servitude of deleting spam, the existentially crushing spadework of fatuous finessing of those lies, one's Facebook profiles. It has spread from the grassroots up, from Berners-Lee's desktop to the world, has been coterminous with lots of other intolerable things. Yes, you might well reply. We can all draw up lists of how terrible our experience of online life is. But you're moaning about the internet, not the world wide web: they are two very different things. (Basically, the internet contains the web; the web is a particular pipe inside the broader "internet" pipe. "Web" tends to mean, "take these files and lay them out on a screen in a particular way"; "internet" means, "here's a file, do whatever you want with it.") Indeed, Wired magazine, only four years ago, had an all-orange cover with four black words that read: "The Web is Dead". It went on to argue that Berners-Lee's beautiful egalitarian vision had been supplanted by a customised, commercialised online paradise or hell (depending on your politics). Internet penseur Chris Anderson wrote that increasingly we're abandoning the open, unfettered web for simpler, sleeker services online that work – and make lots of money for app creators.