‘This is for everyone’: Tim Berners-Lee is continuing his search for a benign online world
Opinion
Thirty-five years after inventing the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is still trying to create an internet that maximises social good. His core mission is to decentralise the web by liberating data from tech platforms.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee was given a starring role in the spectacular opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games, highlighting the best of Britain.
The inventor of the world wide web tweeted live during the event: “This is for everyone.”
Even though the broadcast had been time-shifted in the US, his appearance caused an embarrassing hiccup, with NBC presenters Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer noting: “If you haven’t heard of him, we haven’t either.”
Their ignorance was probably caused by two factors. Berners-Lee is not American; but perhaps more importantly, he is not a multibillionaire — because he decided not to patent his information-sharing invention. Instead, he gave it away for free because he believed it really was “for everyone” and has since argued that access to the internet should be a human right.
Over the years, Berners-Lee has called on the big technology groups to be regulated to prevent the web from being “weaponised at scale”. As early as 2018, he was lamenting the fact that what was once a rich selection of blogs and websites had been compressed under the weight of a few dominant platforms such as Google and Facebook.
Although Berners-Lee acknowledged that the major players had made some efforts to tackle fake news, bots and malign-influence operations, their systems had essentially been built to “maximise profit more than maximise social good”.
Unfulfilled promise
As the web celebrated its 35th anniversary this month, Berners-Lee has not given up on his quest to maximise the social good of the internet and AI, he believes, will be a major factor.
In a recent article in the Financial Times, while he was wistful because of “the challenge of yet unfulfilled promise”, he still had reservations about how the world wide web was doing after 35 years.
The inventor argued that the platforms’ selection feeds chooses “things that make people angrier and serves them progressively more extreme views”. He believes that, while it would be easy for the platforms to make the feeds benevolent rather than polarising, they have chosen not to do so.
Although Berners-Lee believes government regulation is a last resort, it is now necessary because the industry has failed to act.
“There is harm being done to our young people and to the online public and to the online public square where humanity gathers. I would encourage governments to provide legislation and regulation around this,” he argued.
For Berners-Lee, there are two ways forward towards a more benign future for the web.
One is to reverse the ability of social media platforms to build unscalable garden walls, with our personal data trapped inside.
After all, you can have email groups using different providers such as Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo. We need the same sort of interoperability in social media, Berners-Lee argued.
He added: “One way to do this is to mandate that social network platforms follow new standards. Another is to quietly build an alternative world using these standards and let people realise it is better.”
A better alternative
Unsurprisingly, Berners-Lee is already on his way to try to build that better alternative online world.
His solution? A raft of initiatives that have in common the aim of bringing lots of data together while keeping it under the control of individuals.
The Open Data Institute he co-founded in London has launched the challenge of creating international co-ordination for a new standard that would give users control over their own data.
Berners-Lee has called it Solid (for social-linked data) and the aim is to decentralise the web. On top of that, he has also co-founded Inrupt to build a data wallet on top of Solid that can store everything from driving licences to medical data.
With data all in one place, links can be made.
“That’s where the real magic happens,” Berners-Lee explained — magic that could even save lives. He gave the example of how tracking financial data can help flag up ovarian cancer by spotting how women were managing symptoms by buying pain and indigestion medication.
Liberation of data
The next step is to make data insights accessible to everyone via AI agents — agents that would not just work for us but act in our best interests.
Naturally, Inrupt is already building such an agent, called Charlie, which will use data from Solid to generate personalised answers.
“This is my vision for a new interface between users and the web — the evolution from ChatGPT, Gemini, Pi and DeepSeek. We have shown what is technically possible — now we need to show the face of social-linked data to empower people all over the world,” Berners-Lee revealed in the FT.
It all sounds complicated, even convoluted, but a vision that combines tightening regulation of the worst abuses of the current social media giants with the creation of a more benign social media world could be celebrated in time for the 50th anniversary of the world wide web.
Solid, Inrupt and Charlie could combine to do the business on behalf of us in a new frontier for the liberation of data. After all, Berners-Lee’s first website, info.cern.ch, quickly went from nowhere to usage going up by a factor of 10 every year, so doubling every four months — before it went off the scale entirely.
Maybe in this new frontier even hosts on American networks might know about Berners-Lee — the man who chose not to become a billionaire.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.