When Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web (WWW) with Robert Cailliau in 1989 at CERN in Geneva, it was all to be written on the internet . That gave the network an architecture and a common language for all that we continue to use today: from the best use of hypertext, the identification of urls and, above all, the possibility of sharing information in a much easier way than before. In a way, the invention of the Web meant humanizing the internet.
Berners-Lee, now 66, has since expressed concern about the direction the web was taking . A debate in which we are all: privacy and expression problems, control by the most important and largest companies that have ever existed and also by governments, and the stressor that it seems to pose for the human being in general a world visually advocated by social networks .
After those 30 years, TBL is trying to solve several of the problems of the current web such as data processing, privacy and digital identity with Inrupt , a startup that has just received funding from 30 million dollars.
TBL exposes through this company his vision of what for him should be the new, more powerful and fairer Web, in which he has been working in recent years, a Web that, among other things, would undermine a part of the power that Facebook, Amazon, Google and others have over our lives .
Inrupt's proposal has several legs, but all of them are built on Solid, a platform that Berners-Lee and his colleagues at MIT have been developing in recent years and that allows users to control the vast amounts of digital data that exist on them. and that collects for example any application.
“The important thing,” says TBL in a recent interview in Boston Magazine, is that, “for the first time, users – and not large technology companies – will have control of our data, which means that sites web and applications will be created to benefit us and not them ”. That, in turn, could spell revolutions in things that really matter, from healthcare and education to finance and the World Wide Web itself. “That requires us to imagine a very different world,” he maintains.
For example, if we use an application to run, right now it is capable of knowing a lot of data about us. Everything we can give you a free bar to enter: our heart rate, health status, training frequency, location … With Solid, it would be easier for us to manage how far we give access and understanding for what purpose each data serves. This technology could also be used to manage true digital identities, something that would solve the duplication that now exists between Google accounts, Apple IDs, or digital identity documents issued by governments. It is ambitious and also suggests why that power should be entrusted to a company, even if TBL is after it.
The inventor of the web who now denies it
The idea for Inrupt, while it may sound grandiose, comes from someone who already changed the world three decades ago. The web has changed us in everything. However, despite the enormous repercussions of his creation, Berners-Lee is dissatisfied – even anguished – by the current state of the Web.
Believe, first of all, that the platform is now controlled by a few entities that are too powerful: Google, Facebook, Amazon… . His domain, in fact, is directly opposed to the Web that, according to him, he tried to invent some 30 years ago: a tool that democratizes access to information; that elevates humanity; that exists, as he has often said, “for everyone”.
This initial idea is partly related to the new bells that are proposed by the so-called Web3 , DeFi and the decentralization that also drives the crypto world. Are we looking at a new utopia?
The objective of Inrupt is to create a common platform where users can control our data
At the same time, Berners-Lee has come to believe that, from a technology perspective, there is much, much more that the World Wide Web can do to truly improve the lives of all those all.
That is where, according to his proposal, Solid and Inrupt comes in, that Berners-Lee has launched it with his partner John Bruce. Its objective? Let Solid take over the web ecosystem , cutting the wings of the tech titans and lifting everyone else up.
Berners-Lee has tried during this time already to put the web on track and keep it as healthy as possible, seemingly without much success. In 1994 it created the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) , an organization, based at MIT, whose main function is to ensure a common set of technical guidelines for the platform (without which it would become a thousand different mini-systems, none of which communicate with each other.) In 2009, after the Internet was adopted by more than 20% of the world's population, he and his now wife, Rosemary Leith, co-founded the World Wide Web Foundation, whose mission remains to “promote the open Web as a public good and a basic right ”. Both sets go back to TBL's broader vision: for the Web to be something unique and unified that connects all of humanity.
It's funny that although our digital age has spawned many celebrities – Zuckerberg, Bezos, Jobs, Musk – Berners-Lee is still almost unknown outside of the tech world.
According to Berners-Lee, the invention of the Web was, at least at first, a simple attempt to solve a problem that bothered him. After graduating from Oxford in 1976 and a series of technology-oriented jobs, in the mid-1980s he was working at CERN, the highly regarded scientific research center in Geneva. He enjoyed his work, but was frustrated at not being able to see up close what his colleagues were doing. Yes, you could ask people what they were doing, but accessing the data that a colleague might have on their computer was challenging. Although computer scientists Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn had developed the technology that made the Internet possible in the early 1970s, using it was cumbersome at best.
He began to think about the problem and, in March 1989, at the age of 33, he wrote a memorandum to his superiors at CERN , in which he outlined a new way of linking the computers to each other, using, in part, an existing technology called hypertext. The proposal was quickly… ignored. It wasn't until the following year, after Berners-Lee resubmitted the memo, that his boss – who had scribbled “vague but exciting” on the document – told Berners-Lee to give it a try.
Inrupt logo That fall he went to work and, in a matter of weeks, created a new language ( the now famous HTML ) to build what would be called web pages; a new protocol (hypertext transfer protocol, or HTTP) to specify how computers could request and receive these HTML pages; and the first browser in history that allowed users to view web pages. More importantly, at some point the project went from being a way of connecting CERN computers to being a way of connecting all computers together, which is evident in the name that Berners-Lee he finally chose for his new creation: the World Wide Web . In August 1991, it made the first web page available to the public, offering visitors an overview of the concept along with the code to build their own web pages.
Almost immediately, the father of the Web and his colleagues at CERN were faced with a dilemma: Should they charge people to use the software he had written, as other computer pioneers did with their software? Or should they make it free? Berners-Lee, aware that his vision – an extensive network of computers interconnected and sharing information – could only come true if people embraced the technology, he turned to the latter. In 1993, CERN made World Wide Web software public domain; its inventor would be content not to see a penny for it.
The Web developed slowly and quickly, if that can be true. It was slow in the sense that the number of early adopters – most of them connected to universities – was negligible, especially compared to the billions of people roaming the planet. But the exciting thing was that the number grew exponentially each year. Right after its launch in the summer of 1991, the original Berners-Lee server received between 10 and 100 hits a day. The following year there were 1,000 visits a day. In 1993, the number of visits was 10,000.
In 1994, recognizing the need for an organization that would unify the standards and protocols of the technical part of the Web, Berners-Lee founded the W3C, opting to bring it to MIT after being recruited by several veteran computer scientists of the university.
Will your new bet work?
What is fascinating, at least in hindsight, is the relatively low profile Berners-Lee had over the next decade or more, even as millions of people began discovering his invention and making it part of their everyday lives.
In November 2019, just a few months before COVID changed the world, Berners-Lee appeared before a select audience at the Design Museum in London to give an annual talk broadcast by the BBC and presented by a distinguished speaker. In recent years, the once reluctant Berners-Lee has become a more public figure, giving more speeches and interviews, and tonight he spoke about the state of the Web and why he saw the need for what he called “A course correction” . When the speech was over, the audience was invited to ask questions.
A man took the microphone and, in a tone of observation rather than criticism, addressed Berners-Lee. “You created a machine to help the exchange of scientific information, but it is nevertheless brilliant at spreading disinformation. You gave it away for free, and yet it creates billionaires and monopolies. You created a communication tool that allows people to create echo chambers around them ”. He paused. “I suppose the question is: when did you realize that you had built something so ironic?”
Prototype of the use of Solid After a brief pause, the audience burst into laughter. TBL laughed too, looked away briefly and looked back at the man. “The web grew steadily, exponentially,” he said, suddenly waving his arm to give it a more dramatic touch, “and so did the irony . There was no specific point, so now the sense of irony is quite high ”.
The man continued: Was there a moment when Berners-Lee realized that the Web was not what he wanted?
TBL responded that, for a long time, it advised people who complained about everything bad on the web to just ignore it and consume only the good. “That worked for everyone I met: they committed to the web because they simply visited the places they liked” , he said. “Then in 2016, we realized that there were a ton of other people, not connected to the people I knew at all, who were doing the same thing: going to the websites that they liked. And they were very different websites, so they have a very different filter bubble. And the problem was … they vote. And so while it's okay for me to live in a filter bubble, it's actually not okay to have filter bubbles. So with the 2016 election (following the US election and the Cambridge Analutica scandal), I think certainly at the Web Foundation, we blogged that it's time for a turnaround. We realized that it is not just about mant ener the web open and free. It's about what people do with it. ”
For the last decade, and certainly for the last half dozen years, Berners-Lee has focused on two major areas: trying to make the Web again the entity at the service of humanity that he intended it to be, and building a technology that allows the future Web to be more useful and powerful than any of us imagined it could be. These two missions seem to converge more and more, at least on paper in Inrupt .
“The web does not have to stay as it is now. It can be changed. It must be changed. It has to be changed. ”
TBL Berners-Lee and her colleagues have been working at Solid for nearly a decade, helped by a million dollar grant from Mastercard in 2015.
By this he means that Solid intends to correct what has turned out to be a defect, an imbalance, in the original design of the web: where the data resides and who controls it. With the current architecture of the web, if you visit Facebook, Amazon, Google or any other site, those entities capture and control the data that is generated -what you are looking for, what you buy, what you say, with whom you interact- to create their own profiles of you. TBL now recognizes several problems with this way of acting, starting with what happens when an unwanted third party seizes that data and does something nefarious with it.
But beyond the problem of leaks and data and attacks, there is another at an operational level and that is that the data that Google has about us is not the same as that of Facebook, for example.
The challenge for the Solid team is not to make the technology work but to get an already developed web ecosystem to adopt the new platform
The solution to both problems that Inrupt proposes? Let the users, and not the sites, collect and control their own data, and then let the users decide which websites or applications are allowed to access that data. With Solid technology, this is achieved by giving users the ability to create their own “pods”, digital storage lockers where all their data resides. And in theory, everything could really mean everything, not just the search history and how many episodes of a series have been watched, but your medical history, tax returns, bank accounts, personal trainings … The advantage of this is clear: when we download an application, that application can be allowed to have access to all that data . Thus, developers can create software much more powerful – and potentially much more useful – than the current one. This, of course, also seems to give too much power: too much information from one. But the supposed proposal of TBL is that we will be the users who will control what, how and how much they know about us.
Berners-Lee believes this is a better deal not just for users (who will finally control what rightfully belongs to them: the details of their lives) and developers (who will be able to create some really amazing apps), but for all parts of the digital ecosystem. Most online marketers, he argues, don't want to collect, store, and have to protect their data, especially now that privacy and security are becoming hot topics.
After several years of development, the challenge for the Solid team is not to make the technology work – it does – but to get an already developed web ecosystem to adopt the new platform.
Last November, Inrupt announced the first product to market – a server built with Solid technology – along with its first four clients: the BBC, the UK's National Health Service, the NatWest bank of the United Kingdom and the government of Flanders, the Belgian region. Each organization has announced a different pilot project, but they all share the goal of providing more user-friendly, more personalized and more dynamic services. The BBC, for example, is using the technology to power a more sophisticated recommendation engine for its streaming services, an engine that relies not just on the BBC shows you've watched, but what you watch on Netflix and Spotify. . The Flemish government, for its part, has piloted a Solid-backed service called My Citizen Profile, in which residents store their data in a pod, and then give the government access when needed. for services. That large companies that base their business on data such as Google, Facebook or Amazon adopt it, is another story.
We will see if TBL manages to change the world for the second time.
