Fast Society Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee Tells Us His Radical Novel Conception To Upend The The World Broad Web

From Fast Company:

With an ambitious decentralized platform, the manful somebody bring upward of the spider web hopes it’s game on for corporate tech giants similar Facebook together with Google.

Last week, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, asked me to come upward together with meet a projection he has been working on nigh equally long equally the spider web itself. It’s a crisp tumble twenty-four hr menses inwards Boston, where Berners-Lee industrial plant out of an component subdivision higher upward a boxing gym. After politely offering me a loving cup of coffee, he leads us into a lean conference room. At i goal of a long tabular array is a battered laptop covered amongst stickers. Here, on this computer, he is working on a invention to radically modification how all of us alive together with come about the web.

“The intent is globe domination,” Berners-Lee says amongst a wry smile. The British-born scientist is known for his dry out feel of humor. But inwards this case, he is non joking.

This week, Berners-Lee volition launch, Inrupt, a startup that he has been building, inwards stealth mode, for the yesteryear nine months. Backed yesteryear Glasswing Ventures, its mission is to turbocharge a broader crusade afoot, amidst developers some the world, to decentralize the spider web together with accept dorsum ability from the forces that induce got profited from centralizing it. In other words, it’s game on for Facebook, Google, Amazon. For years now, Berners-Lee together with other cyberspace activists induce got been dreaming of a digital utopia where individuals command their ain information together with the cyberspace remains gratuitous together with open. But for Berners-Lee, the fourth dimension for dreaming is over.

“We induce got to produce it now,” he says, displaying an intensity together with urgency that is uncharacteristic for this soft-spoken academic. “It’s a historical moment.” Ever since revelations emerged that Facebook had allowed people’s information to hold upward misused yesteryear political operatives, Berners-Lee has felt an imperative to larn this digital idyll into the existent world. In a post published this weekend, Berners-Lee explains that he is taking a sabbatical from MIT to locomote total fourth dimension on Inrupt. The companionship volition hold upward the showtime major commercial venture built off of Solid, a decentralized spider web platform he together with others at MIT induce got spent years building.

A Netscape for today’s Internet
If all goes equally planned, Inrupt volition hold upward to Solid what Netscape i time was for many first-time users of the web: an tardily means in. And similar amongst Netscape, Berners-Lee hopes Inrupt volition hold upward simply the showtime of many companies to emerge from Solid....

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