The inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW), Timothy Berners Lee, called at the largest European technology conference "Web Summit" in Lisbon to reach a new "agreement" that will make the Internet safer and more accessible.
About 70.000 people gathered at the four-day conference, which is also called "Davos for geeks".
Among the participants are representatives of leading global technology companies, politicians and start-up companies who hope to attract the attention of more than 1.500 investors there, Hina agency reports.
Tech companies are on the defensive as critics accuse them of not doing enough to curb the spread of fake news that has helped polarize election campaigns around the world and maximize profits by harvesting data on customers' Internet browsing habits.
Berners Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 as a way to share information, said "the Internet has strayed from the path its founders set out."
"Everything has gone in the wrong direction. We have fake news, we have privacy problems, we have people who have been manipulated," he said at the opening of the Summit.
Berners-Lee, 63, called on governments, companies and citizens to reach a "full deal" that would make the internet "secure and accessible" by January 2019, when 50 percent of the world will be online for the first time.
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