President Biden’s tech to-do list

President Joe Biden is inheriting tricky tech questions including how to rein in powerful digital superstars, what to do about Chinese technology and how to bring more Americans online.

Here’s a glimpse at opportunities and challenges in technology policy for the new Biden administration:

Restraining tech powers

Under the Trump administration, there were investigations, lawsuits and noisy squabbles over the power of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and other tech companies. Tech giants can expect more of the same under Biden and a Congress narrowly controlled by Democrats.

Government lawsuits that accused Google and Facebook of breaking the law to become successful or stay that way have been handed off to the new administration, which is expected to continue them. More lawsuits could come, too, possibly making it harder for Big Tech to continue as is.

On Tuesday, a top Justice Department lawyer appointed by former President Donald Trump agreed with many of the prescriptions from congressional Democrats who said America’s top four tech superpowers are harmful monopolies. The speech showed that hating Big Tech is one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement.

Online speech

This was a central internet dispute long before Facebook and Twitter locked Trump’s accounts after he was accused of inciting a mob. The question of what, if anything, the government should do about online expression is just getting trickier.

This policy fight has fixated on a bedrock 1996 internet law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives websites some legal protection for what their users do. It means Yelp can let people leave reviews and screen them for fraud or nastiness, without being legally accountable to unhappy restaurant owners. Yet, the law also protects websites where people post sexually explicit photos of their exes without permission.

Democrats and Republicans both have misgivings about Section 230, but not for the same reasons. Those on the right have said that the law gives internet companies too much leeway to intervene in what people say online. Democrats, including Biden, have said that internet companies have too much cover not to intervene in harmful

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 opensource software project, Solid, and later founded a company, Inrupt, with John Bruce, a veteran of five previous startups, to kick-start adoption.

“This is about making markets,” said BernersLee, who is Inrupt’s chief technology officer.

Inrupt introduced in November its server software for enterprises and government agencies. The startup is getting a handful of pilot projects underway in earnest this year, including ones with Britain’s National Health Service and with the government of Flanders, the Dutchspeaking region of Belgium.

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 webbrowsing 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 “infomediaries” 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.

Tech companies have formed a Data Transfer Project, committing to

personal data they hold portable. It now comprises Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Twitter. The Federal

Trade Commission recently held a “Data to Go” workshop.

“In this changed regulatory setting, there is a market opportunity for Tim Berners-Lee’s firm and others to offer individuals better ways to control their data,” said Peter Swire, a privacy expert at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business.

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.

The National Health Service has been working with Inrupt on a pilot project for the care of dementia patients that moves from development into the field this month. The early goal is to give caregivers access to a broader view of patients’ health, needs and preferences.

In Flanders, a region of more than 6 million people, the government hopes the new data technology can nurture opportunities for local entrepreneurs and companies and new services for citizens. Personal data in pods can be linked with public and privatedatatocreatenew applications, said Raf Buyle, an information architect for the Flanders government.

For Berners-Lee, the Solid-Inrupt venture is a fix-it project. He has spent his career championing information sharing, openness and personal empowerment online — as director of the World Wide

Web Consortium, president of the Open Data Institute, and an academic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Oxford University. His accolades include a Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of computer science. In his native England, he is a knight — Sir Tim.

“But Tim has become increasingly concerned as power in the digital world is weighted against the individual,” said Daniel Weitzner, a principal research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Labmake oratory. “That shift is what Solid and Inrupt are meant to correct.”

The push to give individuals greater control over their data, BernersLee said, often begins as a privacy issue. But a new deal on data, he said, will require entrepreneurs, engineers and investors to see opportunities for new products and services, just as they did with the web.

The long view is a thriving decentralized marketplace, fueled by personal empowerment and collaboration, Berners-Lee said. “The end vision is very powerful,” he said.

Whether his team can realize that vision is uncertain. Some in the field of personal data say the Solid-Inrupt technology is too academic for mainstream developers. They also question whether the technology will achieve the speed and power needed to become a platform for future apps, such as software assistants animated by a person’s data.

“No one will argue with the direction,” said Liam Broza, a founder of LifeScope, an open-source data project. “He’s on the right side of history. But is what he’s doing really going to work?”

Others say the Solid-Inrupt technology is only part of the answer. “There is lots of work outside Tim Berners-Lee’s project that will be vital to the vision,” said Kaliya Young, cochair of the Internet Identity Workshop, whose members focus on digital identity.

Berners-Lee said that his team was not inventing its own identity system, and that anything that worked could plug into its technology.

Inrupt faces a series of technical challenges, but none that are “go-to-themoon hard,” said Bruce Schneier, a well-known computer security and privacy expert, who has joined Inrupt as its chief of security architecture.

Schneier is an optimist. “This technology could unlock an enormous amount of innovation,” potentially becoming a new platform as the iPhone was for smartphone apps, he said.

“I think this stands a good chance of changing how the internet works,” he said. “Oddly, Tim has done it before.”