Berners-Lee launches web foundation

The founder of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has set up a foundation to extend the internet to the entire world.

Called the World Wide Web Foundation, Berners-Lee said the organisation's aim will be to extend the capabilities of the net by ensuring that it is available to all the world's people.

It will "advance a web which is open and free", said Berners-Lee ahead of its official launch in the US. Foremost among its guiding principles will be to promote democracy, free speech and the freedom of surfers to access the online content they want, Berners-Lee said.

He acknowledged that it "is a very big undertaking" and said that if the foundation "accomplishes everything I can think of, we'll have failed".

Berners-Lee also spoke of his anxiety about the way the internet is used to spread disinformation.

"On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable," he said.

He told the BBC that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a non-profit organisation that promotes web design standards, had looked into ways of branding websites.

"I'm not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways," he said. "So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways."