(2021-09-14) Can MIT's Tim Berners-Lee Save The Web?

Can MIT's Tim Berners-Lee Save the Web? Berners-Lee—Tim to friends, Sir Tim to the rest of us commoners—is laying out his vision of the new, more powerful, more righteous Web he’s been working on for the past several years.

The example he’s landed on to help me understand it? Someone who’s preparing for a marathon and downloads a training app

“Right now, you can tell an app where you go to run or people you run with,” he continues, “but it only looks at running. It can’t talk to you about nutrition.” It can’t even see what trainers you ordered.

This new type of app, on the other hand—built on a platform called Solid, which Berners-Lee and his MIT colleagues have been developing for the past several years and which lets users control the mega-amounts of digital data that exist about them—would be able to do all of those things…and lots more. It would, if I so chose, be able to look at my blood chemistry and make training recommendations based on what it sees

It will be looking at your whole life, coaching you.”

The real point, he says, is that for the first time ever, we users—not big tech companies—will be in control of our data, which means that websites and apps will be built to benefit us and not them

Berners-Lee is dissatisfied—distraught, even—at the Web’s current state. He believes, first of all, that the platform is now controlled by too few entities that are far too powerful—Google, Facebook, Amazon

At the same time, Berners-Lee has come to believe that, from a technological perspective, there’s far, far more that the World Wide Web can do to really improve the lives of all those everyones.

To hear Berners-Lee tell it, the invention of the Web was, at least initially, simply an attempt to solve a problem that was nagging him.

you could ask people what they were doing—the coffee break room was a lively and important place to exchange information—but accessing whatever data a colleague might have on his computer was a challenge.

Sir Tim responded that, for a long time, he counseled people who complained about all of the bad stuff on the Web to just ignore it and only consume the good stuff. “That worked for everybody I knew—they engaged with the Web because they just visited the places they liked,” he said. “Then, in 2016, we realized there was a whole bunch of other people, not connected with the people I knew at all, who were doing the same thing—going to websites they liked. And they were very different websites, and so they have a very different filter bubble. And the problem was…they vote. And so even if it’s fine for me to live in a filter bubble, actually it’s not okay to have filter bubbles. So with the election of 2016, I think a lot of people did a double-take. I think certainly at the Web Foundation, we blogged that it’s time to turn left. It’s not, we realized, just about keeping the Web open and free. It’s about what people do with it.”

When he and I talk, Berners-Lee goes back to what people are doing with his invention. For many years, he says, he and other technologists saw the Web as simply a neutral infrastructure, a place capable of reflecting both the good and bad parts of human nature. If people chose to use that infrastructure for negative things, well, that wasn’t necessarily his and his colleagues’ responsibility. But what’s changed his mind, he tells me, is the ever-growing—and increasingly divisive—impact of social media.

all that can have a psychological effect on whether people are going to be more constructive or more argumentative

Berners-Lee and his colleagues have been working on Solid for the better part of a decade, helped along by a $1 million grant from Mastercard in 2015

Solid seeks to correct what has turned out to be a flaw, an imbalance, in the Web’s original design: where data resides and who controls it.

those entities capture and control whatever data is generated

several problems with this arrangement, starting with what happens when an unwanted third party gets hold of that data and does something nefarious with it.

your data sits in thousands of separate silos.

nobody really has a full picture of you, which means computer applications are limited in how much they can help you.

The solution to both problems? Let users, not sites, collect and control their own data, then let users decide which websites or apps are allowed to access that data

giving users the ability to set up their own “pods,” digital storage lockers where all of your data resides

Most online retailers, he argues, don’t really want to be collecting and storing and having to protect your data, particularly now that privacy and security are becoming hot-button issues.

After several years of development, the challenge for the Solid team isn’t making the technology work—it does—but getting an already-developed Web ecosystem to adopt the new platform.

form Inrupt, which at least initially is focusing on selling Solid technology to large enterprises such as governments and corporations

Last November, Inrupt announced the first product it was bringing to market—a server built with Solid technology—along with its first four clients: the BBC, the National Health Service in the U.K., NatWest Bank in the U.K., and the government of Flanders, a region of Belgium

For Bruce, the strategy of working with governments and large companies has a dual benefit. It not only exposes Solid-backed services to tens of millions of Web users, but once users have set up pods, they’re teed up for other Solid-backed apps that could come down the pike. It’s a quasi–Trojan Horse strategy

it’s hard to see how powerful tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google—whose business models depend on hoovering up as much data as possible—will benefit from giving control of data back to users

Lalana Kagal, Sir Tim’s colleague at MIT, is skeptical that the adoption of Solid will be a bottom-up phenomenon driven by users. She’s bullish on the technology long-term, but believes a more likely scenario for adoption is that governments get increasingly strict about giving users control of their own data—and a company like Solid becomes the default way that happens.

The other big issue is whether any of this will truly make the Web any better—that is, any closer to Sir Tim’s original vision

Sinan Aral, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and author of The Hype Machine, a book about the nefarious impact of social media, says changing the code that powers the Web is necessary, but insufficient. Solid, he says, “is a technical solution to enable the private control of data. But I think there are a lot of social, economic, and legal changes that have to accompany any technical solution.” By social changes, Aral mostly means the way we users behave. Studies suggest people say they care about privacy and data, but at the end of the day we never do much to back it up. In such a world, it’s easy to see billions of people giving Facebook as much data as they want, the consequences be damned.