35 years after first proposing the World Wide Web
After seeing the balance of power shift to large corporations and big tech companies, the founder of the World Wide Web is determined to give users control over their data again. When computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee sent a memo detailing his idea of a "distributed hypertext system" on March 12, 1989, it was largely ignored by his colleagues at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. This is not surprising: CERN is a place where scientists build huge colliders, not a think tank for computer geeks. Why should they care about one man's curious idea to create an interlinked web of information? The answer was that he was trying to make their lives easier. Several thousand scientists worked at CERN at the time, but information about their projects sat in silos. Linking them together through one extended network of computers seems obvious now, but it took 18 months before Berners-Lee was granted permission to dedicate time to his idea.
He published the first web page for CERN users in December 1991 and freely distributed his software the following year. Exponential growth soon followed. By 1994, with over 10,000 web servers online, Berners-Lee saw the need for standards. He moved from CERN to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to ensure that the web's royalty-free, open nature was baked into its principles. He also started talking about "the semantic web." This concept is built upon metadata and relationships — think of it as a machine-readable version of the internet that adds both context and structure.
Pushing for a more open web
Berners-Lee helped to set up the World Wide Web Foundation in 2009, which aims to"[fight] for a world where everyone has affordable, meaningful access to a web that improves their lives and where their rights are protected.".
For the past decade, he has also pushed for the third evolution of the web, which he dubs "Web 3.0." This often gets confused with Web3, but they are very different: Web3 is based entirely around the use of blockchain to build a decentralized internet, with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin used to trade. Web 3.0, by contrast, stays true to the founding principles of being open and royalty-free. It also builds on the two key ideas of the semantic web and giving people control over their data.
In 2016, Berners-Lee created the Solid protocol, a "single sign-on across the web," he told CNBC's Beyond The Valley podcast in February 2023. "And then you give everybody [their] own personal cloud storage, call it a Solid pod, they have complete control over that."
Rather than hundreds of companies controlling the data you have provided to them, as is the status quo, any app creator can access your data, or a portion of it, by tapping into your pod, with your permission. Berners-Lee used the example of sharing data with a vacation-planning app at the Global Freight Summit in November 2023. "So I'm going to show you all the data in my pod about all of the other family vacations that we've had before, just for the purposes of helping me find the next one. Then it will all vanish, [the app] won't have access anymore." Can the internet's creator make Web 3.0 a mainstream idea?
In the five-and-a-half years since its foundation, Inrupt has scored some successes. It worked with the Flemish government to create a "data utility company" called Athumi, giving consumers and businesses within Flanders their own pods in which they can store their personal data. This system enables users to control and share data, for example to share career data with prospective employers and smartwatch data with doctors.
