Tim Berners-Lee, considered one of the "fathers" of the modern Internet, is about to launch a new project. He has been working on it with a team of like-minded people for over nine months.
The project is called Solid, and its goal is to gradually create a decentralized network that should destroy the monopoly of large Internet companies. On the basis of Solid, developers will be able to create applications that work in conjunction, but independently of each other and of the entire platform.
Berners-Lee considers the loss of control over their personal data one of the most important problems of the modern Internet. The difference between the Solid platform and the current Internet is that the user will be given full control over all his data in any application. Thanks to this, a person can leave any services without leaving anything in them.
Berners-Lee showed Fast Company screenshots of one of the Solid-based applications. It is a hybrid of an email client, cloud storage, messenger, music service and task manager. He created this application for his own use, but is ready to share it with other people soon.
Berners-Lee is also working on a decentralized version of the Alexa voice assistant called Charlie. Unlike Alexa, Charlie gives users the ability to store their own data and not depend on information from the Internet.
Tim Berners-Lee is the head of the World Wide Web Consortium. In March 2018, he published an open letter commemorating the 28th anniversary of the launch of the internet. In it, he said that, in his opinion, large Internet companies have monopolized the market and do not allow small projects to develop. He also expressed the hope that users will realize that it depends on them what the Internet and Internet services will be like in the future. Users create a demand for various services and have the right not to accept those conditions with which they do not agree, making a choice in favor of services that listen to their desires and take into account their interests.
Until recently, Berners-Lee worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and now he works for his own company, Inrupt. In addition to him, several other well-known people in the IT industry, as well as volunteer programmers, are involved in this project. Berners-Lee is looking to raise funding from investors, and while he isn't particularly interested in earnings, Solid's platform could have a profound impact on the market and undermine the position of companies that are worth billions of dollars.
