The International Telecommunications Union, a UN agency, has been discussing how the internet should be regulated at a conference in Dubai.
Robert Cailliau, who is partly credited with developing the World Wide Web, told Al Jazeera that the conference is likely to fail to address "commercial meddling" by the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter.
The influence of these companies, said Cailliau, is more worrying as they are not governments, but behave as such, exerting a huge amount of control over user data.
