Tim Berners-Lee: 'Privacy is not a partisan thing'

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web, was declared recipient of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery's AM Turing award on Tuesday. In an interview with the Guardian, Berners-Lee discussed the "appalling" attitude of Republican politicians seeking to roll back net neutrality protections, how his own legacy intersects with the great Alan Turing's, and the astonishing progress of the web since he launched the very first website on 1 August 1991. Berners-Lee hasn't rested on his laurels since creating the information space in which this article is being read: the 61-year-old information scientist, now at Boston's Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has spent years fighting to protect an open internet and against privatization of personal data. The 51-year-old prize could scarcely go to a more appropriate recipient. Turing's innovations helped to standardize computing, and Berners-Lee helped to make standardized conversation between computers possible for the layman.