START
he creator of the internet thinks it’s
time for an update. In September 2018,
Sir Tim Berners-Lee – the father of the
world wide web – launched the startup
Inrupt, co-founded with cybersecurity
entrepreneur John Bruce, with a mission
“to restore rightful ownership of data
back to every web user”.
Since 2015, Berners-Lee (pictured
right) has been working on a new web
infrastructure called Solid, which
rethinks how web apps store and share
personal data. Inrupt aims to drive the
development of the Solid platform from
an innovative idea to a viable platform for
businesses and consumers. “My group in
CSAIL [Computer Sciences and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory] at MIT had
been working on Solid for some years,”
Berners-Lee says. “The initial goal of
Inrupt is to add the energy and resources
of a startup to the open-source efforts
to make the Solid movement happen.”
Over the past three decades, the
web has evolved into something very
different to Berners-Lee’s original vision
of openness, co-operation and creativity.
Most of the data we put online is now
siloed on the servers of companies like
Google, Facebook and Twitter, and used
to sell us as an audience for targeted
advertising. We can download and
delete our online histories, but we still
can’t easily move our data between
services. “Innovation and value creation
are choked by powerful forces whose
focus is primarily on what generates
profit or serves political agendas,”
says John Bruce, who takes the role of
CEO at Inrupt, while Berners-Lee is CTO.
The big idea behind Solid is that
instead of a company storing all your
personal data on its servers, you
would keep it on your own personal
data “pod”, which is located on a Solid
server. You could run your own server
or host it with a provider, much as with
a personal website. You could then give
individual apps permission to read and
write to your pod. When you want to
stop using an app, you just revoke its
access. The data remains on your pod,
and businesses making apps never
have to worry about storing it, deleting
it, or making it easily exportable.Inrupt:
the plan
for the
next web
Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s new
mission is to help you take
back control of your dataAs well as funding the development
of Solid and apps for the platform,
Inrupt will host free Solid pods to make
it easier for independent developers
to create new apps. The company is
based in Boston, Massachusetts, and
is backed by the venture capital firm
Glasswing Ventures. It currently has a
staff of more than 20, plus an active open
source development community that
Bruce says numbers in the hundreds.
Bruce and Berners-Lee aren’t waiting
for the current generation of tech giants
to switch to an open and decentralised
model: Amazon and Facebook are
unlikely to ever give up vast data caches
harvested from billions of users. But
they hope their alternative model will
be adopted by an increasingly privacy-
aware population of web users and
the organisations that wish to cater
to them. “In the web as we envision it,
entirely new businesses, ecosystems
and opportunities will emerge and
thrive, including hosting companies,
application providers, enterprise
consultants, designers and developers,”
Bruce says. “Everyday web users will
find incredible value in new kinds of apps
that are impossible on today’s web.”
The company claims there are 1,200
new Solid community members, and
more than 30 open-source developers
building apps on the platform. The
current roster of Solid apps includes
management apps, contact directory
and messaging tools, and a clutch of
blogging, social and note-taking apps.
“There is no single ‘killer app’,” Bruce
says. “For different people, different
apps will be life-changing.”
For now, Bruce and Berners-Lee aren’t
prepared to say much about how Inrupt
plans to make money, save for that the
company will provide products and
services for businesses and individual
users who want to implement Solid.
As Bruce sees it, the real opportunities
are expected in businesses that have
yet to be invented. “Already, there is a
growing appetite for Solid from potential
businesses and partners who recognise
that Solid can free them from stifling
data silos and create a blank slate for
innovation.” KG Orphanides solid.mit.eduRight: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, whose
Solid web infrastructure could
upend the ownership of user dataPHOTOGRAPHY:^ NADAV^KANDER