World Wide Web Foundation closes its doors: Tim Berners Lee will focus on Solid

For the past fifteen years, the World Wide Web Foundation, headed by Tim Berners-Leehas been at the forefront of a large number of initiatives to make the web a safer and more accessible space for everyone. Now, with a good part of its initial objectives met, what is one of the references on the website has decided to close its doors.

Tim Berners-Lee himself announced this in a letter published on the foundation’s own website. When this initiative was launched in 2009, only 20% of the world’s population had access to the Internet and there were hardly any initiatives that were promoting access to the web. The foundation that the inventor of the web launched with Rosemary Leith made sense.

A decade and a half later, with almost 70 percent of the world online and a large number of organizations pursuing the same purposes as Tim Berners Lee’s organization, the foundation believes that perhaps the time has come to take a step back. The two founders thank their supporters over the years, who “have allowed us to make significant progress” in terms of access and affordability. But the “problems facing the web have changed,” they insist, and the foundation believes other groups can continue the work.

In 2008, only 20% of the world’s population had access to the Internet

As they also explain in the statement, one of the most serious problems facing the Internet of the 21st century is the business model that revolves around social networks and large technology companies, focused on the commercialization of data. of users and the concentration of power on large platforms… which clashes head-on with Sir Tim’s original vision for the web.

Combating this reality means facing new challenges and one of the most important for Berners-Lee is to continue betting on that decentralized model that the web promised to be in the first place.

“We, along with the Web Foundation board, have been asking ourselves where we can have the greatest impact in the future,” the authors say. “The conclusion we have reached is that Tim’s passion for returning power and control of data to individuals and actively building powerful collaborative systems must be a top priority going forward. To best achieve this, Tim will focus his efforts on supporting your vision for the Protocolo Solid and other decentralized systems.

Solid: an Open Source project to decentralize the web

Announced two years ago, Solid is an open source project that in order to decentralize the webfrom three tools. On the one hand, a single universal registry that works everywhere. On the other hand, an ID for each user where data can be shared. And finally a universal API that allows access to this data from other applications.

In Solid you can find Pods, that is Personal Online Data Store. Or what is the same: when an application or company wants to access data, it must request access to each person’s personal Pod that is not stored by third parties.

As our digital journey increases, the Pods are loaded with information, such as our own life’s memories and experiences. Hence the distance with Web3 where the information is in a chain of blocks. In Solid, photos, music, bank accounts, etc. are stored privately. Some interesting features are:

• It is an organized collection of standards, data formats and vocabularies that provide the same capabilities as today’s social applications.
• This collection ranges from authentications, identities permission lists, contact management, messaging, subscriptions, comments, discussions…
• It has a design based on the HTTP protocol, REST services and HTML, that is, 100% compatibility with the structure of the existing website and makes the task easier for application developers and server administrators.
• It has an environment to test and validate the different implementations.
• The objective is to have a large community that provides documentation, discussions, tutorials, and presentations… with the aim of promoting the ability of this way of working with web applications.
• A server can be enabled to function within the Solid ecosystem hosting pods using NodeJS
• The list is open and any interested cloud service provider can offer itself as a collaborator.

Currently, the development of Solid is being carried out by Inrupt, a startup that already offers companies interested in implementing this protocol the software they need for their servers, a Pod structure and the apps they need so that clients can store your data securely.