Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web

Not being technical at this level it is hard to know what this may offer us. Comments anyone?

Last week, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, asked me to come and see a project he has been working on almost as long as the web itself. It’s a crisp autumn day in Boston, where Berners-Lee works out of an office above a boxing gym. After politely offering me a cup of coffee, he leads us into a sparse conference room. At one end of a long table is a battered laptop covered with stickers. Here, on this computer, he is working on a plan to radically alter how all of us live and work on the web. 

“The intent is world domination,” Berners-Lee says with a wry smile. The British-born scientist is known for his dry sense of humor. But in this case, he is not joking.
This week, Berners-Lee will launch Inrupt, a startup that he has been building, in stealth mode, for the past nine months. Backed by Glasswing Ventures, its mission is to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it. In other words, it’s game on for Facebook, Google, Amazon. For years now, Berners-Lee and other internet activists have been dreaming of a digital utopia where individuals control their own data and the internet remains free and open. But for Berners-Lee, the time for dreaming is over. 

“We have to do it now,” he says, displaying an intensity and urgency that is uncharacteristic for this soft-spoken academic. “It’s a historical moment.” Ever since revelations emerged that Facebook had allowed people’s data to be misused by political operatives, Berners-Lee has felt an imperative to get this digital idyll into the real world.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-lee-tells-us-his-radical-new-plan-to-upend-the-world-wide-web

Comments are off but here's some from a tech professionals.  It doesn't look like a silver bullet!
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*shrug*

There’s a lot I could say. I imagine this proposal having equally bad downsides to the current “open” internet where users have little data privacy concerns. Those downsides likely only become realized far in the future. On the flip side, there are a ton of people at Google and Apple and Firefox trying to make the current internet better.

I read the fastco article and it had more depth. Sounds like the closest analogy is how Apple has built out the iOS ecosystem, which is extremely locked down and privacy conscious. I’d argue it also places a high barrier to entry in terms of cost and economic class (iphones are expensive, good apps are rarely free, free apps are abusive like slot machines).

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This is a lot like a system that John and I have been talking about, inspired in part by some talks I heard from Jaron Lanier.


But yeah, I see this as being quite similar to the app permissions on your phone. Various apps will try to gain access to your data and people will largely grant that access so they have fully functioning apps, so in the end I don't think it will stop the big data collectors. And I don't see anything baked in that will make news or feeds from social media any more real and verifiable, or how data is used once it's handed over. For that to happen the existing social networks will need to be replaced by new networks that have complete transparency on how the feeds are generated. Or the old networks will need to be forced into transparency.


This is a good system, kinda like email encryption is a good system. I think it relies on actual humans to care about their privacy and to take steps to protect themselves. Give the tools to the people and the smart ones will use them smartly. Everybody else will still get their data eaten and their feeds curated by others with their own agendas.


Never the less, it certainly looks like a platform that could be used for the creation of some interesting apps, I have a few in mind that this could help with. The tag system I once described to you in particular.

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