Father of World Wide Web Launches Radical Startup to Take Back the Internet from Google & Facebook
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A revolutionary startup was recently announced by the "father of the world wide web" which plans to radically decentralize the internet to give it back to the people.
by Tyler Durden
"For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told Vanity Fair last month. "I was devastated" he said while going through a litany of harmful and dangerous developments of the past three decades of the web.
That's why "the Father of the World Wide Web" has launched a start-up that intends to end the dominance of Facebook, Google, and Amazon, while in the process letting individuals take back control of their own data.
Berners-Lee's new online platform and company Inrupt is being described as a "personal online data store," or pod, where everything from messages, music, contacts or other personal data will be stored in one place overseen by the user instead of an array of platforms and apps run by corporations seeking to profit off personal information.
The project seeks “personal empowerment through data” and aims to "take back" the web, according to company statements.
The man who created the world wide web by implementing the first ever successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the internet in 1989 lamented that his creation has been abused by powerful entities for everything mass surveillance to fake news to psychological manipulation to corporations commodifying individuals' information.
But he's long been at work on a new project to take the web back, described in depth by the business technology magazine Fast Company:
“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.”
“We have to do it now,” Berners-Lee said of the newly launched project. “It’s a historical moment.” He identified the main impetus behind his recent announcement that he'll be going on sabbatical from his research professor post at MIT to work full-time on the project as the recent revelation that Facebook allowed political operatives to gain access to some 50 million users' private data.
At MIT Berners-Lee has for years led a team on designing and building a decentralized web platform called 'Solid' — which will underlie the Inrupt platform. The Inrupt venture will serve as users' first access to the new Solid decentralized web:
“If all goes as planned, Inrupt will be to Solid what Netscape once was for many first-time users of the web: an easy way in. And like with Netscape, Berners-Lee hopes Inrupt will be just the first of many companies to emerge from Solid.