The Creator of World Wide Web Says, “I Created a Monster”

The creator of World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners Lee is now admitting that his invention is disastrous, and that his brainchild is a monster. In the year 1989 when he invented the web, Sir Tim Berners Lee, he invented it with certain egalitarian principles and with the intention that sharing of information would benefit humanity, but it seems the other way round.

In a recent blog post, Sir Tim Berners Lee said, his brainchild has “evolved into an engine of inequity and division, swayed by powerful forces that use it for their own agendas”. The scandal such as security breach where Cambridge Analytica obtains millions of Facebook users data has pained 63-year-old Sir Tim. In the blog post, he cited the public’s mistrust of apps that, “spy on them and have an ulterior motive of distracting them with propositions to buy this and that”.

Sir Tim Berners Lee now plans to guide the web towards a better path and therefore he is to take a break from his academic responsibility at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work on an online platform that gives people control of their data.

Through a start-up company known as Inrupt, Sir Tim is launching Solid, an online platform, he says, “I will be guiding the next stage of the web in a very direct way. Its mission is to provide commercial energy and an ecosystem to help protect the integrity and quality of the new web.”

He also gave a demonstration of the new platform to the Fast Company, a business magazine and used an app to access all his data seamlessly, which includes his music, videos, research and chats. “It’s like a mash-up of Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify and WhatsApp,” according to Fast Company.

On Solid, all the information of the user will remain under the users direct and immediate control and all the data are stored in a personal online data store or pod. Therefore it will allow the users to decide which apps and services can access which data points in their pod. The pod looks like a personal USB stick and to access or add the contents the third parties must have to seek permission from the user.

Sir Tim also believes that his new platform is going to challenge the business model of the companies such as Facebook and Google that harvest the users' data in order to drive revenue from the targeted ads. Though he has made it clear that he is not talking to Google and Facebook about this or to change their business model.

The person who gave us the world of Internet is now mending its way for its proper utilization. Sir Tim’s move is timely, because last week Facebook admitted that it has again fallen victim to a cyber attack that enabled unknown attackers to access the control of nearly 50 million users accounts and obtained their data. This also shows how the attackers get access to the users' accounts on other apps almost regularly and therefore with new invention we hope for a better digital future.