Sir Timothy Berners-Lee is the British computer scientist who is largely credited with the invention of the World Wide Web. In 1990 he set up the first client/server HTTP communication over the internet using CERN networks. At the time, CERN staff wanted to charge royalties for anyone who wanted to use the HTTP system developed by Berners Lee and CERN faculty. He appealed to them to reconsider, claiming that it should be a free way of viewing information, accessible to anyone. Had he failed to convince, the web as we know it today would not have existed.

Following in his path as free web activist, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee is using money from the James L. Knight Foundation – which supports community building and journalistic enterprises – to start an initiative of his own: The World Wide Web Foundation.

The seed grant from the Knight foundation will help Berners-Lee in achieving the goals of his new organization which are to promote an open, free web, to improve the usefulness and robustness of the web, and to extend the reach of the web to underserved, developing countries.

Berners-Lee is also the head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which exists to provide open standards for the web and prevent competing browser developers [who] sought to divide the Web into incompatible islands." Members of the W3C have developed such standards as HTML, XML and Style Sheets, which give the web its universality and accessibility today.

Berners, with the WWW Foundation, is going a step further now, moving to support infrastructure that will bring "the application of the Web for the benefit of underserved communities"; standards and regulations that will prevent the spread of falsity and misinformation throughout the internet so that it is a tool of freedom and not control, and developing the technology to make it more accessible to as many people as possible. "However, these avenues require significant collaborative efforts,” Lee-Berners said, “worldwide, by all those who seek to fulfill the original vision of the Web: humanity connected by technology."