Internet pioneer, Tim Berners-Lee has an audacious yet powerful goal for his latest startup Inrupt. He wants to “reset the balance of power on the web and reignite its true potential.” Building work with other Internet activists at MIT he is developing a decentralized personal web based platform called Solid. He is introducing a ‘Netscape’ browser front end that gives the user control of all his own content. During a demo he shows a fundamental set of tabs with a To-Do List, Calendar, Chat Address Book and eMail. Yet, this screen hides from the user one basic difference, all his data is stored in a POD or Personal Online Data store. All the content he creates or uses is stored in a POD, not some corporate server like Google, or Facebook.
Source: Tim Berners-Lee – 9/29/18
Users of the Inrupt browser and applications are given a Solid identity and access key to personalize security. Berners-Lee envisions an Alexa like persona assistant, he calls Charlie where a user can be comfortable accessing health records, financial accounts and personal memos in POD storage not a Amazon cloud server. He sees global web developers writing appls for Solid and Inrupt to take back the Internet, provide the security and safety of personal identity management and reduce the need for government regulation.
We are excited about the opportunity to finally end the corporate control of user created content which we have always believed is the user’s property not the Internet application provider. Google, Facebook and Apple have the idea that they own our content, can do anything they want with it, including selling it to partners without our permission.
Solid and Inrupt are revolutionary in scope, technology and return the Internet to its original vision – to empower users and link them together on a peer to peer basis. Not, a corporate behemoth holding all the content power to a weak end user. Maybe with technology like Solid we can finally get back to a democracy of entrepreneurs, small business and users controlling their content, its use and distribution!