Tim Berners-Lee wants to change the face of the internet he created. In September 2018, the father of the world wide web announced the launch of startup Inrupt, co-founded with cybersecurity entrepreneur John Bruce, which has as its mission “to restore rightful ownership of data back to every web user.”
Since 2015, Berners-Lee has been working on a new web infrastructure called Solid, which rethinks how web apps store and share personal data. Inrupt aims to drive the development of the Solid platform and transform it from an innovative idea to a viable platform for businesses and consumers. “My group in the CSAIL [Computer Sciences and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory] Lab at MIT had been working on Solid for some years,” Berners-Lee says. “The initial goal of Inrupt is to add the energy and resources of a startup to the open-source efforts to make the Solid movement happen.”
Over the past three decades, the web has evolved into something very different to Berners-Lee's original vision of openness, co-operation and creativity. Most of the data we put online is now siloed on the servers of companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter, and used to sell us as an audience for targeted advertising. We can download and delete our online histories, but we still can't easily move our data between services. “Innovation and value creation are choked by powerful forces whose focus is primarily on what generates profit or serves political agendas,”says John Bruce, who takes the role of CEO at Inrupt (Berners-Lee is CTO).
The big idea behind Solid is that, instead of a company storing all your personal data on their servers, you would keep it on your own personal data “pod”, located on a Solid server. You could run your own server or host it with a provider, much like a personal website. You could then give individual apps permission to read and write to your pod. When you want to stop using an app, you just revoke its access. The data remains on your pod, and businesses making apps never have to worry about storing it, deleting it, or making it easily exportable.
As well as funding the development of Solid and apps for the platform, Inrupt will host free Solid pods to make it easier for independent developers to create new apps. The company is based in Boston, Massachusetts, and is backed by venture capital firm Glasswing Ventures. It currently has a staff of more than 20, plus an active open source development community that Bruce says numbers in the hundreds.
Bruce and Berners-Lee aren’t waiting for the current generation of tech giants to switch to an open and decentralised model; Amazon and Facebook are unlikely to ever give up their user data caches. But they hope their alternative model will be adopted by an increasingly privacy-aware population of web users and the organisations that wish to cater to them. "In the web as we envision it, entirely new businesses, ecosystems and opportunities will emerge and thrive, including hosting companies, application providers, enterprise consultants, designers and developers,” Bruce says. “Everyday web users will find incredible value in new kinds of apps that are impossible on today’s web."
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Since launch, the company claims there are 1,200 new Solid community members, and more than 30 open-source developers building apps on the platform – and 60,000 developer accounts. The current roster of Solid apps includes management apps, contact directory and messaging tools, and a clutch of blogging, social and note-taking apps. “There is no single ‘killer app,’” Bruce says. “For different people, different apps will be life-changing.”
For now, Bruce and Berners-Lee aren't prepared to say much about how Inrupt plans to make money, save for that the company will provide products and services for businesses and individual users who want to implement Solid.
As Bruce sees it, the real opportunities are in businesses yet to be invented. “Already, there’s a growing appetite for Solid from potential businesses and partners who recognise that Solid can free them from stifling data silos and create a blank slate for innovation.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
