Tim Berners-Lee Wants the Internet Back
The inventor of the World Wide Web is on a laudable mission to give everyone control of their online data. He’s fighting an uphill battle.
A clarion call.
Photographer: Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images
Tim Berners-Lee has a radical proposition. Instead of leaving our online data vulnerable to harvesting by large tech platforms and governments, we should control it. Our own little piece of the web or “personal cloud” should need permission to be accessed.
The idea sounds reasonable in theory, though in practice it’s a big ask. The internet today isn’t the vibrant, motley network that came into being after Berners-Lee first fashioned it in 1989, but a landscape dominated by huge companies like Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook. In many parts of the world, Facebook is the internet and the only experience that people have of the web. Most apps function as gatekeepers of our personal data.