Tim Berners-Lee reveals his vision for a new web using Solid

Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Brad
Barket/Getty

• Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, posted
  a blog on Saturday laying out his vision to create a new,
  decentralized web.
• Berners-Lee has expressed his discontent with the way
  his invention has been abused by powerful entities to pursue
  their own agendas.
• He wants to give users more personal control over their
  data and apps using his new platform, Solid.
• Following the news of
  a massive data breach at Facebook which affected over 50
  million users, Berners-Lee’s announcement was
  well-timed.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, and
for a while now he’s been trying to break it.

In
a blog post posted on Medium on Saturday, Berners-Lee
outlined what he’s been up to — and it amounts to a manifesto for
a new, fairer internet.

His intervention was well timed. Just a day earlier, Facebook
provided a reminder of exactly the kind of thing that Berners-Lee
is kicking against, when it revealed the details of a massive
data breach affecting 50 million users.

“For all the good we’ve achieved, the web has evolved into an
engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who
use it for their own agendas,” Berners-Lee wrote, reflecting on
his invention. “Today, I believe we’ve reached a critical tipping
point, and that powerful change for the better is possible — and
necessary.”

Berners-Lee has been a vocal opponent of big tech companies
abusing user data,
calling for more regulation and saying he was
“devastated” by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

He hopes to put the genie back in the bottle with a two-pronged
approach.

Firstly, he pointed to his open-source project Solid, which he
has been working on over the past few years. With Solid,
Berners-Lee hopes to give users much more control over their
data, allowing them to decide which of their apps can access it.

“Solid is a platform, built using the existing web. It gives
every user a choice about where data is stored, which specific
people and groups can access select elements, and which apps you
use,” he wrote.

He also launched a new company, Inrupt, which will provide a
commercial structure within which to push Solid forward.

“Inrupt’s success is totally aligned to Solid’s success,” he
wrote. “Inrupt will be the infrastructure allowing Solid to
flourish. Its mission is to provide commercial energy and an
ecosystem to help protect the integrity and quality of the new
web built on Solid.”

Inrupt’s CEO and Berners-Lee’s partner is John Bruce, who was
formerly CEO at a cybersecurity company Resilient, which was

acquired by IBM in 2016.

“Inrupt’s mission is to ensure that Solid becomes widely adopted
by developers, businesses, and eventually… everyone; that it
becomes part of the fabric of the web,” Bruce wrote in
a blog post on Inrupt’s site.

“I’m incredibly optimistic for this next era of the web,”
Berners-Lee added. “The future is still so much bigger than the
past.”