In brief
- Tim Berners-Lee, CTO of Inrupt, spoke at Web Summit.
- Inrupt has created Solid, an open-source privacy platform.
- It ostensibly provides a way for users to grant access to their data while retaining ownership of it.
Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and CTO of Inrupt, thinks he's come up with a way to decentralize the Web. But it doesn’t have anything to do with a blockchain, Berners-Lee and CEO John Bruce explained at Web Summit yesterday.
Inrupt last month released Solid, an open-source privacy platform that lets users store their own data, then grant access to companies and organizations at will—rather than letting social media and advertising companies harvest their data and sell it for hefty profits.
Founder of World Wide Web releases his Contract For The Web
The founder of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, yesterday released a Contract For the Web. The 32-page document sets out commitments to “guide digital policy agendas” for governments and companies worldwide. Berners-Lee has been critical of the state of the Web for some time now. He has argued that the web being free has led to monetization of personal data and that there are far too many cybersecurity issues. He even is leading a project at MIT called Solid, designed to help rebuild the Web. But...
This, Bruce and Berners-Lee claim, decentralizes the internet because it gives power back to the people who own and produce the data.
“So the default is that it is yours,” said Berners-Lee at yesterday’s summit. “You can share it with insurance companies if you want if that's part of the deal, but you're in control.”
The benefit of this is that businesses and organizations can focus on servicing customers, said Bruce. “Most organizations don’t want your data but they’d like to have access to it.”
A healthcare organization such as Britain’s National Health Service, which is building an app on Solid, could focus on ensuring the British public remains fit and healthy.
“And that's a very, very different world to live in, where we don't have to surrender our data for organizations to service us. But we can grant them access to it, we can trust them to work for us,” said Bruce.
So...wasn’t blockchain and crypto supposed to be the decentralized web? Isn’t that what Decrypt is all about?
What is Web 3?
The web is an unfinished project. In this article, we will look at what is, potentially, the next major iteration of the Internet; one in which users take back control from the centralized corporations that currently dominate the web. The main reason that so many people are working hard to redesign the current Internet is because the majority of today’s most-used Internet platforms are controlled by only a handful of powerful companies, which profit from the data users generate. Web 3 is essenti...
Berners-Lee explained: “Blockchain and Solid are different,” he started. “Blockchain is a system where if everybody stores the same data; everyone has a copy of the blockchain.” That’s useful for when you want to, for instance, “have a single ledger of everybody's IDs or what is spent in the bank,” he said.
Referring to Solid, he said, “Everyone stores different data. You're not all tugging at the same level.” Nor, he said, are you “paying to keep the same system going.”
Each organization or individual on Solid has a “pod.” These pods represent silos of data that talk to other pods. So, someone’s pod may grant the NHS access to the pod that stores their health data.
Hmm. “It's a bit like blockchain,” admitted Berners-Lee. Attaboy.
