For 15 years, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, worked with the World Wide Web Foundation, which he founded, to create an Internet that is “secure, reliable, and powerful for everyone.” As the team notes on its website, the organization has now closed its virtual doors at the end of September.
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Berners-Lee and her colleague Rosemary Leath consider their mission partially accomplished. In a letter he stressed that a new fight must be waged: against the “commercialization of user data and concentration of power” of social media platforms.
When the Foundation was established in 2009, just over 20 percent of the world’s population had access to the Internet, Sir Tim and Leith explain their decisionAt that time only a few institutions handled the distribution work.
A decade and a half later, nearly 70 percent of the world’s population is online. Many civil society organizations are now concerned about user rights. Both founders thank their supporters who enabled them to “make great progress”.
main problem social networks
Both write that the problems of the Internet have changed now. So now the time has come for other interest groups to take up this issue from here. The main problem is the business model of the social network.
“Together with the board of the Web Foundation, we asked ourselves where we can make the greatest impact in the future,” say the authors of the letter. “We concluded that Tim’s passion for giving individuals power and control over data and proactively building powerful collaborative systems should be a top priority moving forward.” Berners-Lee therefore wants to focus its efforts on “supporting the Solid Protocol and its vision for other decentralized systems.”
Computer scientists and physicists have been promoting the opening up of data silos for some years. To do this, it relies on the decentralized web project Solid. With its open source initiative, users must in any case determine for themselves where their personal information is stored.
Tim Berners-Lee at Web Summit 2018.
(Image: Heise Online)
New Social Contract for the Internet
Ideally, this is a dedicated “solid data pod” over which the owner has full control. The 69-year-old founded start-up Inerupt to implement this. The company wants to develop a global “single sign-on” function with which anyone can log in to web services from anywhere.
Through the Web Foundation, Berners-Lee advanced his idea from 2018 primarily to create a new social contract for the web. According to the Briton, “Magna Carta” should help tackle grievances such as hate speech, state hacking and cyber crime by building stronger online communities. It was also directed against business models that help spread disinformation.
The federal government is behind the agreement
The federal government endorsed the agreement in November 2018. The finished version was the focus of the inaugural UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Berlin in 2019. Berners-Lee stressed that the aim was to get the web back on track as a force for good. Its principles were included in the Declaration on the Future of the Internet, published by the United States and the European Union together with partners in 2022.
Additionally, Berners-Lee is still considered an important force in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which he founded in 1994. The focus of this organization is on working on standards for the open web. Officially, the W3C now lists the developer of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) as a “Director Emeritus”.
Two years ago, Berners-Lee made it clear that he did not consider the decentralized database technology blockchain as the most viable solution for building the next generation of the Internet. “Ignore Web3 content,” he advised the audience at the Web Summit in Lisbon at the time.
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