The World Wide Web that we all use to look at cat videos and contemplate which Disney princess we look like turned 29 on Monday, so its creator Tim Berners-Lee took the opportunity to call for greater access to the Internet for everybody. 

In an open letter, the 62-year-old computer scientist touched on making online access available to more members of marginalized groups, saying that certain people are more likely to be offline if they are “female, poor, live in a rural area or a low-income country, or some combination of the above.”

Women were 50 percent less likely than men to be online even in urban poor areas in some cities, according to a survey conducted by a division of the Web Foundation founded by Berners-Lee. This gender disparity is even greater in India, where only 17 percent of females are connected, the research says.

Access can also vary for females based in different areas of a country, the survey notes, such as in Indonesia, where 20 percent of females nationwide have access, while for poor women in its capital Jakarta, the figure is higher at 31 percent.

The difference between genders stems in part from income disparities, where a woman who earns less than her male counterpart will have trouble paying for Internet access, especially if she is also poor.

The Alliance for Affordable Internet released a report in 2016 stating that even for countries with seemingly affordable Internet, those prices place a greater burden on the poor by taking up a higher portion of their incomes. The effect is especially pronounced for women, whom the report says earn 30-50 percent less than males around the world.  

US tech giants have taken up the mantle of providing access to regions with low Internet penetration in recent years.

Facebook promoted its Free Basics app starting in 2015 to provide mobile Internet to developing markets such as India, but has faced criticism for not serving local needs and giving them only limited access to services, many of which were created by private US companies. 

Dhanaraj Thakur of the Alliance for Affordable Internet told the Guardian that the platform could address critics by providing limited access to an open web – instead of free access to a limited web. However, India effectively banned the service in 2016, citing that it violated net neutrality by offering free access to selected services over others.

SpaceX took up a similarly ambitious task by aiming to provide fast Internet to everyone in the world, wherever they are, through a network of commercial satellites. Its billionaire CEO Elon Musk filed an application in November 2016 to launch thousands of such satellites into low-Earth orbit, which would not only give access to anyone anywhere, but at speeds comparable to wired connections. It launched the first of its experimental satellites in February this year.

Perhaps leaving the responsibility of creating a safer and more inclusive Internet to only a few companies is not the only way. Berners-Lee says the thinking that it’s too late to change how platforms operate is a “myth.”  

“While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people – and can be fixed by people.”