Tim Berners-Lee - Radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web

This week, Berners-Lee will launch, Inrupt, a startup that he has been building, in stealth mode, for the past nine months. Backed by Glasswing Ventures, its mission is to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it. In other words, it’s game on for Facebook, Google, Amazon. For years now, Berners-Lee and other internet activists have been dreaming of a digital utopia where individuals control their own data and the internet remains free and open. But for Berners-Lee, the time for dreaming is over.

Source

We’ve always believed the web is for everyone. That's why I and others fight fiercely to protect it. The changes we’ve managed to bring have created a better and more connected world. But for all the good we’ve achieved, the web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas. Today, I believe we’ve reached a critical tipping point, and that powerful change for the better is possible - and necessary. This is why I have, over recent years, been working with a few people at MIT and elsewhere to develop Solid, an open-source project to restore the power and agency of individuals on the web.

Inrupt

For some months, we’ve been working with talented thinkers and doers from around the globe, and distributing resources and workload appropriately. Everyone working on inrupt and Solid is incredibly dedicated to shaping the future of the web. Thanks to inrupt’s resources, the Solid open-source community is becoming robust, feature-rich and increasingly ready for wide-scale adoption. What’s equally exciting is the reaction we’re getting from potential partners and businesses. There’s clearly a growing appetite for Solid; a recognition that Solid can free us from stifling data silos and create a blank slate for innovation. Anything we can imagine is made possible. In the web as we envision it, there are opportunities for everyone. Entirely new businesses, ecosystems and opportunities will surely emerge and thrive. And we’ll need hosting companies, application providers, enterprise consultants, designers and developers. The list goes on. But the real opportunities are all the businesses yet to be invented. There’s a long and exciting journey ahead of us all, into an unclear, but certain, future.

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This all sounds great. We need something like this. This is the guy who invented and gave away the internet for free. Tim Berners-Lee, not Al Gore. I was on the internet from the beginning, when websites were just pages of links. There was no Google, you had to use something called Gopher IIRC, hosted by a university to find websites. Somewhere between then and now the WWW was almost perfect, now it is crap. I think we need something new!

The future is still so much bigger than the past

Glad to see that Tim has kept the dream. I remember the early days.

Reality says it will end up the same down the road unless people change their thinking.

I read it but am still confused about what it means... Does it mean there will be no more www, if so what will replace it?
Does it mean less advertisements?
I just don't get how it will be different... help me get it cause I am interested.

a reply to: LookingAtMars

I ask from ignorance not spite. I am barely a user and make my way around the internet by the huge road signs telling me where I can go and where I can't. Arrows pointing in directions that I think I want to go.

I know that there is this notion that the internet should be free and that I heard way back that people should be able to access the internet without servers, these big companies that we now have to go through and pay them for the journey. I also heard that the advancement of the internet would have come sooner but that big money saw that it was the future and that they needed to organize it all to increase their profits, so it took longer for them all to get things organized into a big money making venture rather than as an open road for intellectual exchange.

So this guy, Lee, invented the internet by what you say and gave it away for free. And now we have this big concentrated money machine for those who own it. What I don't get is how could this ''new system' work without all the money pouring into it to make more money. The blurb talks about businesses opening up and all of that.

My understanding is is that business is business and that the goal of business is not freedom but rather the money businesses can make from any venture. If this new system is designed to offer new businesses, what is to prevent them from taking it over as well?? See what I don't understand here?

All that you quoted above sounds to me like just more of the same fancy words and offering promises to consumers that has been the bedrock of advertisers since it all began. There was one line near the end of the quotes that said ''There’s a long and exciting journey ahead of us all, into an unclear, but certain, future.''

That sounds like ''new and improved'' that all companies put on the boxes of their old products when all they did was just add a little salt or change the color of their macaroni.. And that line ''into an unclear, but certain future''. What the heck does ''unclear'' mean. An ''unclear'' vision? How do we know that this is not just more of the same old same old by someone else wanting to cut themselves a larger piece of the pie??

Again, I admit to ingnorance. But if you as you say have been around since the early maybe you could break it all down without all of the rosy patter and advertising those quotes offer.

a reply to: watchandwait410

It appears that you and I are in the same boat here as to distinguishing the ''bad old'' and the ''good new'' here, you just typed it up more succinctly.

a reply to: watchandwait410

The main difference that stood out to me was your data is private, it is in a pod and not bought and sold. New sites and apps can be built using this and the web will be more decentralized. Hopefully someone with more IT knowledge on here can explain it better to us.

a reply to: TerryMcGuire

The way most big internet companies make money is by selling you data, this plan will put them out of business if most switch over to it because your data will no longer belong to them.

Does it mean less advertisements?

That's a choice money makes. it could be free of ads today but it isn't. Ads are just data.

I can't see it much different - it's the mindset of people using it, not the protocol. Assuming people don't change.

At first it was nerds and cool - then the rich, cool kids showed up and you see the rest.

a reply to: TerryMcGuire

Back in the day most things on the web were made by people who loved doing it, not for money. Kinda like open source software and the content on this website.

Good.Do it

They have already started with the BS.

They have shutdown access to TPB.org through internet providers.

It works fine with a proxy

FN saving us like the un-patriotic act again

I wonder about AT&T though, and the other main ISP's. Will they try something to make it harder or more costly to connect to this open source web?

a reply to: CosmicAwakening

Good point, maybe there are plans for something like the old Bulletin board system to be used with this.

originally posted by: CosmicAwakening
I wonder about AT&T though, and the other main ISP's. Will they try something to make it harder or more costly to connect to this open source web?

Control the wires (and wireless - infrastructure) and control the net. And now we see the government can be bought so they get what they want.

If regular people owned all the nodes we will still have to deal with the dishonest.

originally posted by: LookingAtMars
a reply to: CosmicAwakening

Good point, maybe there are plans for something like the old Bulletin board system to be used with this.

Major BBS comes to mind. Long time ago. Not much different then a website today other than how one gets there.

a reply to: roadgravel

The difference to me was the server was a private users computer that you connected to directly.

originally posted by: LookingAtMars
a reply to: roadgravel

The difference to me was the server was a private users computer that you connected to directly.

That has a big part of how private data can be. When I had a server in my place versus a server farm, I knew what level was there. Now I consider that it all can and is easily compromised. How do you trust some guy working for a providing company. Same for email and the cloud in general.

a reply to: roadgravel

Because the data is stored in a pod, in Berners-Lee company. I am sure it is encrypted and hopefully in something like a blockchain, in the sense no one has control over it.

a reply to: TerryMcGuire

You really don't have to worry about it. Anything this guy invents that might circumvent the monied interests like Google..............the money interests like Google can buy and shelve.

Google has market capitalization of $812 Billion, they have annual sales of $123.00 billion.

Put another way?
Argentina has a GDP of $637 Billion.

Google could buy Argentina.

a reply to: TonyS

This is his dream, you can't buy something if the owner will not sell it.

a reply to: LookingAtMars

That to me sounds like a good thing. With that in mind maybe I can begin to understand the difference. You know us amateurs