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Next-Generation Internet: Decentralized and Respect for Privacy: Solid
After more than thirty years of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is not happy with how things have worked out. Issues of privacy and lack of control of user data are two areas that he sees as problems. Berners-Lee views huge tech conglomerates like Facebook and Google as operating surveillance platforms.
He said that “There was a golden age. People talked about the long tail when they said that most of the value on the web is from all of the small people. Isn’t that amazing? When you multiply it there are so many small, medium-sized websites out there. The value we get out of it is just more than anybody imagined. But if you talk to a millennial now, they don’t recognize that as the web they have right now. It’s ironic as they spend all their time on the same social network. They are in fact within a silo being constrained by the capacity of a particular social network.”
Berners-Lee wrote that “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. I believe we’ve reached a critical tipping point, and that powerful change for the better is possible — and necessary.”
Berners-Lee has been working on a new platform that is decentralized and designed to change the way that Web applications work. He named the project Solid (SOcial LInked Data).
Daniel Weitzner, a principal research scientist at the M.I.T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, said that “Tim has become increasingly concerned as power in the digital world is weighted against the individual. That shift is what Solid is meant to correct.”
Solid extends standards currently used for the World Wide Web. Individuals keep their data in PODs, or Personal Online Data Stores and are able to provide, and later revoke, if needed, access on a very fine-grained level to their data. POD data can be searched for by using a DNS-like lookup service.
Berners-Lee said that “I think we know we can build something better, and if you know developers, send them our way.”
