DemandProgress.org sent out a great e-mail celebrating the Internet’s 20th Birthday! That means it’s as old as most college sophomore. Weird.
It was twenty years ago this weekend that Tim Berners-Lee, while working at CERN, put the world’s first website online. It announced his new creation: the World Wide Web.
Last year, while urging Internet users to sign our petition against the Internet Blacklist Bill, Berners-Lee wrote this about the principles that underpin his project — and that make the work of Demand Progress and its members so important:
“No person or organization shall be deprived of their ability to connect to others at will without due process of law, with the presumption of innocence until found guilty. Neither governments nor corporations should be allowed to use disconnection from the Internet as a way of arbitrarily furthering their own aims.”
Sometimes we get so caught up in hating on social networking or gaming sites that we forget what the internet was primarily created for: free expression of ideas. DemandProgress is asking for donations in their fight to keep the internet accessible and open to many. “Internet freedom” as they call it. Visit their site to learn more about their campaign.