Sir Tim Berner unveils strategy for a new secure internet

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, popularly known as TimBL, is an English engineer and computer scientist and is best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is currently a professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989 and implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the internet in mid-November the same year.

Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation and is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com founders chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. He is also the founder and president of the Open Data Institute.

After 50 million Facebook accounts have been compromised, Berners-Lee says that Facebook’s continuous failure to protect its users is something that drives him. “We have to do it now. It’s a historical moment,” he said. "Now onwards, each user has total control over their own data."

Tim Berners-Lee has unveiled his plans for a 'New Internet' that would decentralize the system and take power back from current tech magnets including Google, Facebook and Amazon. The spread of misinformation and propaganda online has exploded partly because of the way the advertising systems of large digital platforms works and hold people’s attention. People are being distorted by very finely trained AIs that figure out how to distract them.

It has finally exploded into his dream of an open resource that everyone can see and interact with, purchase things, connect and innovate on. But that’s come with something no one saw coming back when the internet was in its infancy: unwanted control and manipulation of our data.

Start-up Inrupt is launching an app system that will allow users to regulate what personal information they share on the web and how that information is stored. With Inrupt, users can create their own 'personal online data store' - or POD - to house anything from contact lists to calendar items to music libraries. Put in simpler terms, the technology essentially brings together the functions of programs such as Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify and WhatsApp - all on one browser, all at one time.

The Solid development team is working on software that creates and manages a POD, and once it is fully complete (soon, we’re told) companies and individuals will be able to create and use their own POD servers. What this means is that you can store your own POD on an internet-connected device or simply pay a company to store it for you.

Any and all sites or apps that want access to information about you simply ask your POD for it – depending on your choices, it will say yes or no. For example, a social media platform may ask your POD for your name, age, phone number and any images you might want to share. But the social media platform doesn’t control the information: by disabling the platform’s access to your POD the information is removed.

The Solid platform is a good idea with good goals. Solid PODs are a good and technologically feasible execution of that idea. But will it get its feet off the ground?

In the 29th year of the existence of World Wide Web, this will be the first time in history that more than half of the global population is able to go online and interact. From the early days of dial-up to improving fiber optic connections, the publicly available internet is ever evolving.