Let’s get back to nerds. On Tuesday, Berners-Lee published an open letter on Medium, saying the web is meant to be a “tool that empowers humanity” and is “decentralized with a long tail of content and options.” said. But over the past decade, he writes, the Web “has served to erode these values, rather than embody them.”
Berners-Lee is developing and evangelizing a new system that provides each individual with their own unique online-only data store (POD for short). POD allows users to decide how their data is managed, used, and shared. Belgium’s Flanders region has already authorized POD for all its citizens, Berners-Lee writes. He co-founded Inrupt, a company built on his concept of POD and its associated computer servers.
Tuesday also marked the publication of a book by billionaire entrepreneur Frank McCourt titled “Our Greatest Battle: Reclaiming Freedom, Humanity and Dignity in the Digital Age.” McCourt, the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is not a technology expert himself, but he has assembled a team to create a more human-centric internet.
The primary technology of McCourt’s initiative, Project Liberty, is DSNP, which stands for Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. It’s designed to allow customers to wrest control of data about themselves from social media giants like her Facebook or his TikTok. Your “social graph” (a map of your digital relationships) resides on a distributed database managed by a third party who cannot see the data stored on it. You can remain anonymous, but if you want to share your opinion widely, you may be asked to identify yourself. One of his social networks, his MeWe, has migrated nearly 700,000 of its roughly 20 million users to his DSNP-based system, which uses blockchain.
These are just two of many overlapping and sometimes contradictory attempts to democratize the web. Web 1.0 was Berners-Lee’s original World Wide Web, which was mostly read-only. Web 2.0 includes social media and user-generated content, with lots of interactivity. Web 3.0 is meant to be more decentralized, with no single point of failure or, as Berners-Lee says, a kill switch.
