Sir Tim Berners-Lee looking at ways to wrest control of the web from corporates and governments

Berners-Lee joins others in the fight for a more secure, private and neutral internet

Inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee has spoken of his fears that control of the internet is falling into the hands of a few large corporations and governments.

In an interview with the New York Times this week he spoke of how his invention has steadily come under the control of powerful interests. "It controls what people see, creates mechanisms for how people interact," he said.

"It's been great, but spying, blocking sites, repurposing people's content, taking you to the wrong websites - that completely undermines the spirit of helping people create."

He continued: "The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for microblogging."

Berners-Lee met this week with a group of internet activists including Brewster Kahle, head of the Internet Archive, and fellow internet pioneer Vint Cerf in San Francisco at the Decentralized Web Summit to discuss ways of "re-decentralising" the internet, giving more control to individuals and ensuring more privacy and security.

It is a subject that he has returned to time and time again. On the occasion of the launch of the new documentary ForEveryone.net at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Berners-Lee talked about the importance of defending net neutrality in an age where technology allows unprecedented control of the world's communications.

"The temptation to grab control of the internet by the government or by a company is always going to be there," he said. "They will wait until we're sleeping, because if you're a government or a company and you can control something, you'll want it. You want to control your citizens or exploit consumers - the temptation is huge. Yes, we can have things enshrined in law, but even then it won't necessarily stop people."

In a recent interview with GeekWire Berners-Lee continued with this theme: "We're on the edge of finding that a company can get to the point where actually it will control everything everybody sees," he said.

"It will decide which friends' posts and which news articles a person sees and we realise that whoa, we're talking about one big corporation suddenly having complete control over somebody's view of the planet in which they live. It's a constant battle and we are very close to it all the time."

Berners-Lee is far from alone in looking at ways to wrest control of the web from large corporations like Amazon and Google and from governments who use it as a way of keeping tabs on populations, as Snowden revealed, or to censor what citizens can read.

There is a burgeoning industry of privacy-focused sites and applications, such as social media site MeWe on whose board Berners-Lee sits, personal information management systems (PIMS) such as Meeco and new transactional solutions based on blockchain technology and cryptography.

Others have taken the decentralisation idea further still, such as Scottish firm MaidSafe, which is working on an autonomous internet with no servers and no central control at all.