The British inventor of the worldwide web has warned that the freedom of the internet is under threat from governments and corporations interested in controlling the web.

Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist who invented the web 25 years ago, called for a bill of rights that would guarantee the independence of the internet and ensure users’ privacy.

“If a company can control your access to the internet, if they can control which websites they go to, then they have tremendous control over your life,” Berners-Lee said at the London Web We Want festival on the future of the net.

“If a government can block you going to, for example, the opposition’s political pages, then they can give you a blinkered view of reality to keep themselves in power.

“Suddenly the power to abuse the open internet has become so tempting, both for government and big companies.”

Berners-Lee is director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a body that develops guidelines for the development of the net.

He called for a net version of the Magna Carta, the 13th century English charter credited with guaranteeing basic rights and freedoms.

Concerns over privacy and freedom on the net have risen in the wake of the revelation of mass government monitoring of online activity, following leaks by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

A European Union ruling to allow individuals to ask search engines such as Google to remove links to information about them, called the “right to be forgotten”, has also raised concerns over the potential for censorship.

“There have been lots of times that it has been abused,” Berners-Lee said. “So now the Magna Carta (idea) is about saying…I want a web where I’m not spied on, where there’s no censorship.”

Berners-Lee added that in order to be a “neutral medium”, the net had to reflect all of humanity, including “some ghastly stuff”.

“Now some things are, of course, just illegal – child pornography, fraud, telling someone how to rob a bank – that’s illegal before the web and it’s illegal after the web,” Berners-Lee said.