I've just been watching a recorded video of Tim Berners-Lee being interviewed by Mark Lawson for the BBC. 
It's an absolutely terrible interview - mostly because the interviewer has gotten bogged down in "info-ethics". Though lip service is paid to the fact that the Web is not the Internet, why is Berners-Lee being harangued by a television presenter about the ethics of incorrect and/or immoral information appearing on the Web?
Does Lawson - or whatever researcher wrote these silly questions - honestly believe that misinformation would not be spread if the Web had not existed? Of course it would. The misinformation would be sitting in text files on FTP servers and whizzing around NNTP servers and sitting in Gopher silos. It would be sitting in private bulletin boards.
But now it is out on the web, where we can see it. And those of us who know something can look at it and criticise it. We can point to it and say "look at this ridiculous piece of garbage". We can vote on it using the developing social network services like delicious and use rel tags to mark it up or down. For "info-ethics", the Web is the salvation not the sin.
Berners-Lee really is the model of how technologists should act - with concern over the bad uses of technology, but with a bigger concern to keep it value neutral.
What the interviewer didn't ask - which are the more important questions - is how the Internet is going to develop. It is one of the few technologies where individual users can actually have a shot at pushing things forward. One of the key things about XML is the first letter and what it stands for - extensible.
I must say this interview is highly disappointing. Given an hour or so, anyone with more than a passing knowledge of the Internet could have crafted a set of questions that would have been far more interesting than the tedium of this interview.
