Father of Web says China will dismantle 'great firewall'

China's rulers will ultimately take it upon themselves to dismantle the "great firewall" that limits its people's access to the Internet because doing so will boost China's economy, the inventor of the World Wide Web said.

In an interview about his World Wide Web Foundation's rankings of the way 81 countries manage the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, a London-born computer scientist who invented the Web in 1989, also scolded the United States for undermining the Internet's foundations with its surveillance programmes.

Revelations about the scale of that surveillance and poor rural penetration rates pushed the United States from second place into fourth in the survey, which examined Internet access, freedom and content. Sweden came out on top for the second year. But it was China, which the survey ranked at 57 out of 81, down from a ranking of 29 out of 61 last year, where Berners-Lee saw the greatest potential for improvement.