Tim Berners-Lee works on software project to decentralize the web

Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the world wide web, said in an interview with Vanity Fair that his Solid project aims to decentralize the web and put users back in control of their data.

Solid is the name of an open source ecosystem through which Berners-Lee aims to help ordinary consumers regain control of their data and break the power of large internet companies. He is working on this with a small team of developers, although the project is still in an early phase and it is unclear when a possible release will follow.

“The web has failed and failed to serve humanity as it was intended to,” Berners-Lee says. “I was devastated,” says the web founder, describing how he felt about recent internet scandals like the one at Cambridge Analytica. He had and still has a hard time with the fact that his creation has become what he wanted to prevent.

Earlier this year, during the web’s 29th anniversary, he warned that the dominance of major internet platforms could hold back innovation, which he believes is the result of an increasing concentration of power with a small group of large companies running the show. matters on the Internet.

In April 2017, Tim Berners-Lee received the Turing Award for inventing the world wide web, the first web browser and the fundamental protocols and algorithms that enabled the growth of the web. During the presentation of the prize, he criticized government plans of, among others, the United Kingdom to be able to break encryption.

Berners-Lee came up with a plan for creating the World Wide Web in 1989 as a CERN employee, because he saw that scientists were struggling to exchange information about particle accelerators. The scientist suggested that his colleagues at CERN could share documents over the Internet using plaintext and hyperlinks. To this end, he designed the http and html, which eventually led to the introduction of the world wide web.