Brown pledges to invest in web science
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In the latest round of web-related election promises, PM announces plan for Web Science institute, public services homepage for all
Prime Minister Gordon Brown this morning made a number of pledges that he said would help Britain to become “the world leader in the digital economy which will create over a quarter of a million skilled jobs by 2020”.
Brown said he would invest £30 million to create an Institute of Web Science, to be overseen by web-inventor Tim Berners-Lee and renowned computer scientist Nigel Shadbolt.
This, Brown said, would “place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the semantic web”. He described this as a ‘simple concept’ but one that “has the potential to be just as revolutionary as the web was itself, moving us from a web of managing documents and files to a web of managing data and information - and thus opening up the possibility of by-passing current digital bottlenecks and getting direct answers to direct requests for data and information.”
He also pledged to make public service delivery more efficient through such web-based measures as granting every citizen a personalised homepage through which they can access relevant services.
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The Prime Minister reiterated his intention to improve access to the Internet. “Twenty one percent of UK adults have never accessed the internet,” he said. “That’s over a fifth trapped in a second tier of citizenship, denied what I increasingly think of as a fundamental freedom in the modern world: to be part of the internet and technology revolution.”
Brown made an indirect reference to the Conservative party plans to “unleash private sector investment” in order to enhance the UK’s Internet infrastructure. “We can allow unbridled market forces to provide a solution on its own terms and according to its own timetable as others would do,” Brown said this morning. “The result would be superfast broadband coverage determined not even by need or social justice, or by the national interest but by profitability alone. This would open a lasting, pervasive and damaging new digital divide.”
The future of the Internet and the web has become a much-debated issue in the run up to this year’s UK general election, with all parties promising to improve broadband availability and to use web-based technology to improve transparency and engagement in government.
The present government’s web credentials have been somewhat tarnished of late, however, after the first draft of its recent Digital Economy Bill proved unpopular with the general public. The Bill proposed that organisations offering customers free WiFi would be legally responsible for any copyright breaches that took place over their network, and that Internet service providers must provide copyright owners with details of who has illegal downloaded their content.
Online activism site 38 Degrees says that over 10,000 people have used its service to complain about the Bill to their MPs.
The Digital Economy Bill has been redrafted, although many of the more controversial clauses remain in place.
