The World Wide Web Founder Sir Tim Berners Lee Is Building A ‘New Internet’

Unless you are not a technology kind of person, you would know Tim Berners-Lee is an important person in the world of technology as he is the inventor of the World Wide Web.

And he does not like what his invention has become. So now he is taking some actions against it.

Tim Berners-Lee - the inventor of the Internet

You may notice that Berners-Lee has expressed his dislike at the fact that big corporations like Google and Facebook have placed restrictions on what was supposed to become a free environment. He doesn't like how corporations like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have tried to centralize the Internet and how they are controlling their customers’ data. Therefore, he is building a new version of the World Wide Web, attempting to take away control power of biggest tech corporations.

He has been secretly working on his startup called Inrupt for about 9 months. He shows his commitment by taking a leave from his prestigious teaching job at CSAIL labs of MIT to fully spend his time and effort on his project. This week, Inrupt will be introduced to the world, as Berners-Lee said in an interview.

Inrupt is built on a web platform called Solid which is a platform he and his colleagues at MIT have worked for several years. The main purpose of designing Solid is to make it be like the beginning period of the Internet, free and wild, and Inrupt can be the tool people use to access it. In a demonstration for it, he pulled up what seemed just like a basic browser page with nothing besides its most essential components.

The app also has a feature that allows users to decide where data including address book, message history, music library, documents, and photos are stored and users can access them in just one place or it is just like a combination of Google Drive with Spotify, WhatsApp and everything else. But there is one difference which is the control of data is under users’ control.

Each user of Solid will be assigned to a Solid pod and Solid ID and with those, they will be able to move freely around and delete information and data as they please.

Solid will ask users' permission to allow apps to access to their pods

The “Pod” in Solid pod stands for Personal Data Store which already represents what it’s duty is. It is different from storage apps like Google Drive which stores users’ data in its serves so there is a risk of data harvesting as all of your data will only be kept in the Solid pod. When any app needs access to your data, Solid will ask whether or not you want to allow the app to access your pod.

Berners-Lee believes that people can get out of the data monopoly he thinks tech corporations like Facebook and Google are committing to make. Inrupt, on the other hand, is a tool for people to create their own apps for the platform. Just like what he did with his biggest invention - the Internet, he does not plan to make lots of profit out of the project. He instead will provide source of the platform for everyone and travel around the world over the next few months to guide developers on how to utilize Inrupt to create their own decentralized apps.

Berners -Lee is obviously aware of the fact that what he is committing in doing will not be favored by big tech corporations but as he said in an interview, he does not really care much about that.