China will gradually move to cut censorship of the Internet, but it will take a long time, the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web said Wednesday.

Commenting on Google's threat to pull out of China, Tim Berners-Lee said Beijing was having to move "carefully" in opening up Internet openness, but said the "genie is out of the bottle" in terms of access.
 

"I think that openness increases steadily. Every time you open it the genie comes out of the bottle and it's very difficult to put it (back) in the bottle," he told AFP.
 

Speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, he said: "The Internet has a tradition of bit by bit increasing openness.
 

"It tends not to go backwards...a government that is used to working with an uninformed citizenry might take a while to move to a position where the citizens are informed.
 

"So I can imagine that China might need to move carefully in that direction, but I think we should do everything we can to make it easier for a government which censors the Internet to move in that direction."
 

The comments come after Google, responding to cyberattacks on the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists, said it can no longer censor Web search results in China -- even if that means it has to leave the country.

Google has not yet stopped censoring search results on google.cn, but Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said last week it would happen soon.
 

Source: AFP