Fight against data silos: Berners-Lee shuts down the World Wide Web Foundation

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For 15 years, the inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee worked with the World Wide Web Foundation he founded to create an Internet that is "secure, trustworthy and powerful for everyone". The institution has now closed its virtual doors at the end of September, as the team explains on its website.

Berners-Lee and his colleague Rosemary Leith see their mission as partially fulfilled. In a letter, they emphasize that a new battle must be waged: against the "commercialization of user data and concentration of power" of social media platforms.

When the foundation was established in 2009, only just over 20 percent of the world's population had access to the internet, Sir Tim and Leith explain their decision. At that time, only a few organizations were involved in dissemination.

1.5 decades later, almost 70 percent of the world's population is online. In the meantime, many civil society organizations are taking care of user rights. The two founders thank their supporters for enabling them to "make great progress".

Social networks as the main problem

In the meantime, the problems of the internet have changed, the duo writes. It is therefore time for other interest groups to take over from here. The main problem is the business model of social networks.

"Together with the board of the Web Foundation, we have asked ourselves where we can have the greatest influence in the future," the authors of the letter report. "We have come to the conclusion that Tim's passion for giving power and control over data back to individuals and actively building powerful collaborative systems must be a top priority going forward." Berners-Lee therefore wants to focus his efforts on "supporting his vision for the Solid protocol and other decentralized systems".

The computer scientist and physicist has been campaigning for a few years to open up data silos. To this end, he relies on the decentralized web project Solid. With his open source initiative, users should be able to decide for themselves where their personal information is stored.

New social contract for the internet

Ideally, this would be a separate "Solid data pod" over which the owner has full control. The 69-year-old has founded the start-up Inrupt to implement this. The company wants to develop a global "single sign-on" function that allows anyone to log in to web services from anywhere.

Through the Web Foundation, Berners-Lee primarily promoted his 2018 idea of creating a new social contract for the web. According to the Briton, the "Magna Charta" was intended to help combat grievances such as hate, state hacking and cybercrime by building strong online communities. It was also aimed at business models that help spread disinformation.

German government backs the pact

The German government backed this pact in November 2018. The final version was the focus of the opening of the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Berlin in 2019, where Berners-Lee emphasized the need to put the web back on track as a force for good. Principles from this were incorporated into the Declaration on the Future of the Internet, which the USA and the EU published together with partners in 2022.

At the same time, Berners-Lee continues to be an important force in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which he founded in 1994. This organization focuses on working on standards for an open web. Officially, the W3C now lists the developer of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) as "Director Emeritus".

Two years ago, Berners-Lee made it clear that he did not consider the decentralized database technology blockchain to be the most practicable solution for building the next generation of the internet. "Ignore the Web3 stuff," he advised the audience at the Web Summit in Lisbon at the time.

(mma)