Tim Berners-Lee Is Building a New Decentralized Web

Creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee revealed his plans to create a new decentralized web where data will be controlled by users. Tim Berners-Lee is known for creating the World Wide Web, that is, the internet you know today. More than two decades later, Tim is working to free the internet from the clutches of corporate giants and return power to the people through a decentralized network. Basically, Solid is a platform built using the existing web where you create your own 'pods' (personal data storage). You decide where this pod will be hosted, who will access which data element, and how data will be shared through this pod. These Pods can be on any computer, and preferably on several, in a peer-to-peer network (Remember Napster? ... well...) Today the Internet, although it doesn't have an owner and is spread out, the centralized Internet depends on servers. But most servers are in the hands of a handful of companies, like Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), Google (Cloud), Facebook, and within the Data Centers of big Telecom companies. Berners-Lee's idea is that a decentralized version would depend on a peer-to-peer network built on a community of users. Your Internet-connected devices would host the internet, not a group of high-power servers. Each site would be distributed across hundreds of nodes on different devices, eliminating the possibility of a single server failing due to, say, a DDoS attack. Government oversight can also be reduced: a project being developed today, Anonymouse, hosts anonymous "microblogs" through a mobile phone network. Within countries threatened by an authoritarian government, projects like these can allow information to be distributed freely. The technology that enables this is the same that powers cryptocurrencies: blockchain. A blockchain protocol is designed to allow transactions on a distributed network without the need for an intermediary overseeing the process. Any information can be observed by anyone and is encoded in a way that leaves no one able to tamper with it. Berners-Lee believes that Solid

"will empower individuals, developers, and companies with entirely new ways to design, build, and find innovative, reliable, and beneficial applications and services".

Developers need to integrate Solid into their applications and sites. Solid is still in the early stages, so there are no applications for now, but the project website states that "the first wave of Solid applications is being created now". Berners-Lee created a startup called Inrupt and took a sabbatical from MIT to work full-time on Solid and take it "from the vision of few to the reality of many". If you are interested in Solid, learn how to create applications or contribute to the project in your own way. Naturally, it will take a lot of effort to build and drive the widespread adoption of Solid, so that each contribution contributes to the success of a decentralized network. A handful of startups are already using blockchain to replace certain common Internet services: Everipedia hopes to become Wikipedia on the blockchain, for example, while Mastodon hopes to become decentralized Twitter. Do you think a decentralized web will become a reality? Do you already know our Linux course?