World Wide Web guru unveils Web, PICS technology vision

Berners-Lee's gloomy prediction came as he unveiled his vision of how the Internet will develop and was accompanied by a warning of the danger of government over-regulation and censorship of networks and what they carry.

'If you speeded up all the links by a factor of ten then traffic would increase by a factor of ten. That will always happen when you run over lines where you take as much bandwidth as you can get. At the moment the Internet is all you can eat,' he said.

But Berners-Lee who developed the World Wide Web concept at the Swiss CERN European Physics Laboratory in 1990 said telecom operators could cheaply boost the bandwith available to frustrated net surfers.

'Telecoms operators used to be gearing themselves to provide video on demand. That is very high bandwidth. Traditional telephony runs at 64 Kbit/s which is more than the web which is mainly access at 28 Kbit/s and a lot of the time you are reading so your modem is not even buzzing,' he said.

'So the bandwith needed is small compared to what is around. It's not going to take much money to get the bandwidth for the World Wide Web,' he said.

The World Wide Web's inventor said the big money in the future will be spent on gearing-up networks to pump video through the Internet. 'The video is going to be much more expensive. The cost of doing text is going to be lost in the noise,' he said.

Berners-Lee said Internet service providers will cash-in by offering business customers access to 'un-clogged' networks during business hours at premium rates, and offering cheaper access for occassional or non urgent - and slower - access for private customers.

'There will be different tariffs. People will be willing to pay for industrial strength connection,' he said.

Berners-Lee said he welcomed recent support from the European Commission for the filtering platforms such as PICS developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is now a principal research scientist.

PICS works by allowing content providers to label the material they put on the Web, according to certain benchmarks such as nudity or bad language. Web users such as parents can then use PICS to specify what combination of labels are acceptable for access by children.

PICS also allows companies and net users to label their own or other Web sites as a way of endorsing them, he said.

Berners-Lee is also director of the World Wide Web Consortium which brings together over 250 companies and institutions in North America, the Far-East, and Europe to develop agreed standards for the next generation of web architecture.

He warned that governments and even Internet access providers must not be allowed to use the PICS platform to choose which items to filter.

'I believe censorship [by governments] is a big worry. The danger is that anyone who provides you with Internet access is in a position to filter it. It's a concern and people should be aware of it,' he said.