Exclusive: Tim
Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web
With
an ambitious decentralized platform, the father of the web hopes it’s game on
for corporate tech giants like Facebook and Google.
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. In a post published
this weekend, Berners-Lee explains that he is taking a sabbatical from MIT to
work full time on Inrupt. The company will be the first major commercial
venture built off of Solid, a decentralized web platform he and others at MIT
have spent years building.
A NETSCAPE FOR TODAY’S INTERNET
If all goes as planned, Inrupt will be to Solid what Netscape once
was for many first-time users of the web: an easy way in. And like with
Netscape, Berners-Lee hopes Inrupt will be just the first of many companies to
emerge from Solid.
“I have been imagining this for a very long time,” says
Berners-Lee. He opens up his laptop and starts tapping at his keyboard.
Watching the inventor of the web work at his computer feels like what it might
have been like to watch Beethoven compose a symphony: It’s riveting but hard to
fully grasp. “We are in the Solid world now,” he says, his eyes lit up with
excitement. He pushes the laptop toward me so I too can see.
On his screen, there is a simple-looking web page with tabs across
the top: Tim’s to-do list, his calendar, chats, address book. He built this
app–one of the first on Solid–for his personal use. It is simple, spare. In
fact, it’s so plain that, at first glance, it’s hard to see its
significance. But to Berners-Lee, this is where the revolution begins. The
app, using Solid’s decentralized technology, allows Berners-Lee to access all
of his data seamlessly–his calendar, his music library, videos, chat, research.
It’s like a mashup of Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify, and
WhatsApp.
The difference here is that, on Solid, all the information is
under his control. Every bit of data he creates or adds on Solid exists within
a Solid pod–which is an acronym for personal online data store. These pods are
what give Solid users control over their applications and information on the
web. Anyone using the platform will get a Solid identity and Solid pod. This is
how people, Berners-Lee says, will take back the power of the web from
corporations.
For example, one idea Berners-Lee is currently working on is a way
to create a decentralized version of Alexa, Amazon’s increasingly ubiquitous
digital assistant. He calls it Charlie. Unlike with Alexa, on Charlie people
would own all their data. That means they could trust Charlie with, for
example, health records, children’s school events, or financial records. That
is the kind of machine Berners-Lee hopes will spring up all over Solid to flip
the power dynamics of the web from corporation to individuals.
A NEW REVOLUTION FOR DEVELOPERS?
Berners-Lee believes Solid will resonate with the global community
of developers, hackers, and internet activists who bristle over corporate and
government control of the web. “Developers have always had a certain amount of
revolutionary spirit,” he observes. Circumventing government spies or corporate
overlords may be the initial lure of Solid, but the bigger draw will be
something even more appealing to hackers: freedom. In the centralized web, data
is kept in silos–controlled by the companies that build them, like Facebook and
Google. In the decentralized web, there are no silos.
Starting this week, developers around the world will be able to
start building their own decentralized apps with tools through the Inrupt site.
Berners-Lee will spend this fall criss-crossing the globe, giving tutorials and
presentations to developers about Solid and Inrupt.
“What’s great about having a startup versus a research group is
things get done,” he says. These days, instead of heading into his lab at MIT,
Berners-Lee comes to the Inrupt offices, which are currently based out of
Janeiro Digital, a company he has contracted to help work on Inrupt. For now,
the company consists of Berners-Lee; his partner John Bruce, who built
Resilient, a security platform bought by IBM; a handful of on-staff developers contracted
to work on the project; and a community of volunteer coders.
Later this fall, Berners-Lee plans to start looking for more
venture funding and grow his team. The aim, for now, is not to make billions of
dollars. The man who gave the web away for free has never been motivated by
money. Still, his plans could impact billion-dollar business models that profit
off of control over data. It’s not likely that the big powers of the web will
give up control without a fight.
When asked about this, Berners-Lee says flatly: “We are not
talking to Facebook and Google about whether or not to introduce a complete
change where all their business models are completely upended overnight. We are
not asking their permission.”
Game on.
BY KATRINA BROOKER
https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-lee-tells-us-his-radical-new-plan-to-upend-the-world-wide-web?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Daily&position=2&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=09292018
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