In a way, Tim Berners-Lee’s current project is more ambitious than the one that changed history. When he conceived the World Wide Web in 1989, it didn’t compete with any other deeply-entrenched system for sharing information across the internet, which was still limited to government and academic users at the time. Indeed, without the web, the internet might never have had mass appeal in the first place.
But Solid, which has occupied much of Berners-Lee’s time in recent years, aims to unwind decades of standard practice for how information gets stored online. Since the 1990s, interacting with websites has involved consenting to our data being salted away all over the place. Many companies have been terrible stewards of it, falling prey to hackers or putting it to their own questionable purposes.
With Solid, all that changes. The technology is a standard for storing information of all kinds—in theory, everything from your financial records to your email to your camera roll—in a private cloud-based repository called a pod, for “personal online data store.” Organizations that want to access data in your pod can request it. Whether to grant such access is your call, since it’s your data. But nobody gets free rein to do with it as they will—like, say, feeding it into an algorithm as AI training data.
In 2018, Berners-Lee and John Bruce founded a startup called Inrupt to commercialize Solid. At 2022’s Web Summit conference in Lisbon, my colleague Rob Pegoraro and I talked to them about that challenge. We caught up again at last month’s Web Summit for an update.
The concept behind Solid seems manifestly great to me. The reality requires buy-in from many parties, including tech companies that have every incentive to keep hoovering up our data rather than cede even a little control over it. In the two years since our first conversation, Solid hasn’t transformed the world, but Berners-Lee and Bruce are still making moves to accelerate its development and adoption. One big one came in October, when Inrupt formally turned over overarching responsibility for Solid to the Open Data Institute, a nonprofit cofounded by Berners-Lee in 2012.
Berners-Lee says that work on Solid had reached a stage where the ODI’s infrastructure and connections could help it make more progress more quickly. “The Solid project was basically just a bunch of people meeting in the GitHub system, but now in need of coordination,” he explains. “And so now the Open Data Institute, which has been doing public data and corporate data and shared data, and always recognized the data spectrum includes personal data, has taken on the coordination of the Solid movement in general.”
The previous July, Inrupt refined its own strategy by unveiling a digital wallet platform based on its Solid server software. The term “digital wallet” is meaningful—not because it’s a bold new concept, but because it isn’t. Everyone already has one on their phone: either Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. And the things we use them for, such as managing payment cards, plane and movie tickets, and the like, clearly make everyday life better.
Inrupt is cheerfully piggybacking on that familiarity: “We used to say to people, ‘Look, you’ll get a Solid pod,’” says Bruce. “And they’d go, ‘What’s a pod?’ Now we say, ‘You get a digital wallet.’ They go, ‘Okay, cool. I know what a digital wallet is. Why is yours different from Apple’s?’”
Describing Inrupt’s vision for its wallet as similar to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, except open, would understate its stratospheric aspirations as surely as if you said the web was merely an open version of AOL. Users of today’s wallet apps are dependent on Apple and Google to get new features, and there’s little evidence either company ranks its wallet all that highly as a priority. By contrast, if Inrupt’s wallet caught on, nobody would be dependent on one company for its functionality. Instead, anyone could build apps on top of it, including useful stuff that nobody’s thought up just yet.
Which is not to say that Inrupt doesn’t have ideas of its own. Back in 2018, when Berners-Lee went public with Solid, he began talking about Charlie, an AI assistant that would be far more powerful and personal than the likes of Alexa or Siri, because it would have trusted access to health records, financial information , and other data users stored in their Solid pods. Today, he says, Charlie has gone beyond the conceptual stage. “It works for you and will recommend the best restaurant for you to go to without taking kickbacks,” he offers by way of example. “We’re building that and can show it. And it works.” (Not that Charlie is consumer-ready yet: “Now it’s up to others to help us make it look sexy,” adds Bruce.)
For Inrupt’s wallet technology to have real impact, it might have to be built into operating systems. The chances of Google and Apple ceding total control over their own wallet apps and supporting a common standard may seem slight. But if anyone’s earned the right to optimism, it’s Berners-Lee, whose 1989 vision for the web persists in the fact that all browsers are designed to support the same sites, built on the same web standards.
“With HTML, they always fought but came to the table eventually,” he points out. “Safari and Chrome do the same HTML.”
It’s not just about getting a couple of tech giants on board. Inrupt wants to enable many organizations to host wallet data, with competition for user-pleasing policies: “You can choose a wallet provider to make sure that none of your stuff will ever be scraped (for AI training),” says Berners-Lee. He likens that scenario to Mastodon’s use of the ActivityPub protocol, which lets users choose a social networking server whose terms of service they like.
Over time, making it harder for tech companies to hoard our data might loosen their algorithmic grip on our lives. “People look at a lot of the ills of the world,” says Berners-Lee. “The fact that in America, you can’t have a discussion about anything, the polarization of society, is a serious first-order problem. The people who control those algorithms, if you look at the papers that have been written about this stuff, in fact, they could change those algorithms so that when you’re scrolling through Instagram, you don’t become polarized. They could optimize it not for an angry engagement but for constructive conversation.”
Even if Solid takes off, it won’t solve all the web’s problems by itself. Still, it could make a difference. And it’s not just some random improbable dream: It’s the guy who gave us the web in the first place, staging an intervention to restore some of its original user-centric idealism. How could you not root for that?
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Google’s huge AI challenge. This one’s shameless self-promotion: Our new issue features my feature on Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google’s London-based Google DeepMind AI arm. After spending years working on long-term research with potentially transformative potential, Hassabis is now under pressure to help Google products such as Search and Gmail make huge, AI-infused leaps in capability as quickly as possible. I spoke with him and others inside and outside Google about these dual goals and how they’re going. Here’s the story.
Windows in its infancy. Last week marked the 40th anniversary of Microsoft shipping the first version of Windows. If you forgot to celebrate, that’s understandable: In 1985, so few people bought Windows 1.0 that it was considered a bit of a flop. This video walk-through of how it looked and worked helps explain why it didn’t instantly capture all that many imaginations. (1990’s Windows 3.0 was the one that really took flight.)
A fantastic way to blast through your inbox. Way back in 2019, I mourned the loss of an app called The Email Game, which fixed email’s original sin by doing away with the inbox, giving you distraction-free focus on dealing with one message at a time. Now Hey, the email app I use most often, has introduced The Email Game’s spiritual successor in a wonderful feature called Power Through New. It lets you handle vast quantities of email from one screen without even removing your hands from the keyboard, and is easily worth Hey’s $99/year price all by itself.
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