How the father of the World Wide Web plans to reclaim it from Facebook and Google He has a good point in that much of the website hosting, search, social media has become centralised and owned by a few large companies. It was not what originally envisaged for the Internet. He essentially wants to have hosting and social media operate more like BitTorrent. The thing is Diaspora has also tried this (in isolation as an alternative to Facebook) and most people were not interested. So it is more a case of awareness and when the realisation lands that things have changed. When the World Wide Web first took off in the mid 1990s, the dream wasn’t just big, it was distributed: Everyone would have their own home page, everyone would post their thoughts – they weren’t called “blogs” until 1999 – and everyone would own their own data, for there was no one around offering to own it for us. The web consisted of nodes joined by links, with no center. Now a handful of companies own vast swaths of web activity – Facebook for social networking, Google for searching, eBay for auctions – and quite literally own the data their users have provided and generated. This gives these companies unprecedented power over us, and gives them such a competitive advantage that it’s pretty silly to think you’re going to start up a business that’s going to beat them at their own game. This has inspired an effort to re-decentralize the web. Two of the more important efforts – some would count blockchain as a third contributor – are architecturally very promising. The first comes from Tim Berners-Lee who invented the web and gave it to us as a gift, without patents, copyrights, or trademarks. Berners-Lee’s new project, underway at his MIT lab, is called Solid (“social linked data”), a way for you to own your own data while making it available to the applications that you want to be able to use it. With Solid, you store your data in… http://bit.ly/2aJ8LMY
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