The man who invented the web attended a conference named after it to suggest a course correction for his creation.
“People ask me constantly: Tim, if you could go back in time to 1989, what would you change about how the Web was built,” said Tim Berners-Lee at the start of his talk Thursday afternoon at the Web Summit in Lisbon. By which, he continued, they mean: “How on Earth did we get here, and can we fix it?”
He pointed to the rise of siloed systems and massive data collection that combine to leave web users little autonomy. “The winner is whoever can collect the most data and the loser is everyone else,” he said. “Our data is stuck in systems that we as citizens and consumers can’t control.”
Berners-Lee’s proposed solution is a user-controlled, data-storage service called a Solid Pod from Inrupt—the Boston-based firm at which he works as chief technology officer. He compared a Solid Pod to a USB drive in the sky, except it allows far more granular sharing of data.
“You allow a person or an app access to that specific bit of data, and you can remove access to that bit of data anytime,” Berners-Lee said. “This is done by relying on familiar standards that have been part of the web for years.”
Solid, which launched as a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became a commercial venture when Berners-Lee and his fellow Web Summit speaker John Bruce co-founded Inrupt in 2018. The former had touted Inrupt in November of 2018 in a talk at Web Summit; two years later on the same stage in Lisbon, he and Bruce offered more details about how its implementation has proceeded.
In particular, Inrupt has begun signing up such large customers as the government of the Flanders region of Belgium. “Pods are going to serve as the back end of the government digital account,” Bruce said, outlining a system that sounded like a decentralized version of Estonia’s digital-citizenship architecture.
Neither Bruce nor Berners-Lee offered details about such consumer-level details as a possible price–or about Inrupt’s progress in the United States. The lack of comprehensive federal privacy legislation here ought to make the U.S. a key market for Inrupt, but such prior data-ownership startups as Personal were not able to capitalize on that opportunity. Berners-Lee, however, has a little more name recognition, and he professed optimism Thursday: “The tracks are laid, the trains are ready to run, trusted data is ready to flow.”
Disclosure:Disclosure: I’m moderating four panels at Web Summit, in return for which the organizers are covering my lodging and airfare.
