Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Out to remake digital world
Main figure in early days of web looks to give individuals back their personal power
Three decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee devised simple yet powerful standards for locating, linking and presenting multimedia documents online. He set them free into the world, unleashing the World Wide Web.
Others became internet billionaires, while Berners-Lee became the steward of the technical norms intended to help the web flourish as an egalitarian tool of connection and information sharing.
But now, Berners-Lee, 65, believes the online world has gone astray. Too much power and too much personal data, he said, reside with tech giants like Google and Facebook — “silos” is the generic term he favors, instead of referring to the companies by name. Fueled by vast troves of data, he said, they have become surveillance platforms and gatekeepers of innovation.
Regulators have voiced similar complaints. The big tech companies are facing tougher privacy rules in Europe and some American states, led by California. Google and Facebook have been hit with antitrust suits.
But Berners-Lee is taking a different approach: His answer to the problem is technology that gives individuals more power. “Pods,” personal online data stores, are a key technical ingredient to achieve that goal. The idea is that each person could control his or her own data — websites visited, credit card purchases, workout routines, music streamed — in an individual data safe, typically a sliver of server space.
Companies could gain access to a person’s data, with permission, through a secure link for a specific task like processing a loan application or delivering a personalized ad. They could link to and use personal information selectively, but not store it.
Berners-Lee’s vision of personal data sovereignty stands in sharp contrast to the harvest-and-hoard model of the big tech companies. But it has some echoes of the original web formula — a set of technology standards that developers can use to write programs and that entrepreneurs and companies can use to build businesses. He began an open-source software project, Solid, and later founded a company, Inrupt, with John Bruce, a veteran of five previous startups, to kick-start adoption.
Inrupt’s initial business model is to charge licensing fees for its commercial software, which uses the Solid open-source technology but has enhanced security, management and developer tools. The Boston-based company has raised about $20 million in venture funding.
Startups, Berners-Lee noted, can play a crucial role in accelerating the adoption of a new technology. The web, he said, really took off after Netscape introduced web-browsing software and Red Hat brought Linux, the open-source operating system, into corporate data centers.
Over the years, companies focused on protecting users’ privacy online have come and gone. The software of these “infome diaries” was often limited and clunky, appealing only to the most privacy conscious. But the technology has become faster and smarter — and pressure on the big tech companies is mounting.
Inrupt is betting that trusted organizations will initially be the sponsors of pods. The pods are free for users. If the concept takes off, low-cost or free personal data services — similar to today’s email services — could emerge.