Submitted by: kirkland on Sunday November 05th, 2006 at 07:58 PM EST

The creator of the World Wide Web said on Thursday night that the Internet is in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters, liars and cheats. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the Web in the early 1990s, says that if the Internet is left to develop unchecked, "bad phenomena" will erode its usefulness.

Berners-Lee's creation has transformed the way millions of people work, do business and entertain themselves.

But he warns that "there is a great danger that it becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths, or it becomes a place which becomes increasingly unfair in some way."

He singles out the rise of blogging as one of the most difficult areas for the continuing development of the Web, because of the risks associated with inaccurate, defamatory and uncheckable information.

The next generation of the Internet needs to be able to reassure users that they can establish the original source of the information they digest.

» Full story @ Taipei Times