March 11 2014: The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW) will be 25 years old on March 12. It was in March 1989, that  Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist and former CERN employee, wrote a proposal for what would eventually become the World Wide Web.
Initially meant for CERN alone, it grew  into  the global system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them via hyperlinks. Today  WWW has 2 billion users.(Wikipedia)

In 2009 Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Foundation to "establish the open web as a global public good and a basic right, ensuring that everyone can access and use it freely".
Its Web Index, first launched in 2012, measures how well different countries around the world are harnessing the benefits of an open and universal web. India ranked a  poor 33 out of 60. Read our report here
Berners-Lee was in Hyderabad, India  for the  2011 WWW Conference where he reminded that Web, may be free and available for all -- but don't forget, it relies on a layer called Internet -- and governments more often than not, get to fix it ( and 'switch it off').  Link to our report here.
His warnings about increasing have proved prescient -- with  appalling invasions of personal freedoms   by governments like the US and the UK coming to light. Which is why the WWW Foundation has made Internet Freedom its theme for the 25th anniversary of the Web.