Inventor of the World Wide Web, Dislikes the Internet Today

Original Source: Silicon Stars

Original Author: Du Chen

Original Editor: Vicky Xiao

Original Title: "The Inventor of the World Wide Web, Wanted to Full control of data back to you"

In the era of mobile Internet, the World Wide Web (WWW, Web ) is already an ancient noun that is less mentioned. However, it is still an important tool for people to interact on the Internet through text, multimedia, etc., and it is also the core technology that every top Internet company we know today relies on.

However, 31 years after the birth of the World Wide Web, its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, is very concerned about the use of World Wide Web technology to build The companies of the business empire are quite critical.

The father of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, may have made a very important decision in the history of human technology: make his invention free forever, Anyone can use it. He gave up the right to obtain direct economic benefits such as licensing fees, but it is clear that some smarter people have built a more oppressive and even monopoly business model on the basis of his invention-and this is not the same as His thinking runs in the opposite direction.

These companies wantonly snatch user data, making users "data slaves" in Web 2.0 and later eras.

Berners-Lee is not the only one who has similar thoughts. Dr. Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard University directly defines this business model as "surveillance capitalism" (surveillance capitalism): technology companies harvest user data at all costs, use them to build portraits of users, customize various services, and Push advertisements to earn income. Of course, as a practitioner and a person interested in technology, I believe there will always be times when you will feel the same way: Is this really what the Internet should be like? Am I a beneficiary in this system, or Stripped of something?

Berners-Lee now wants to return the internet to what he thinks it should be.

At the age of 65 this year, he founded a new company, Inrupt, trying to promote a concept of "data autonomy", returning full control of the data to the user, but still allowing the user to work normally. Use a variety of Internet-based services.

The Father of the World Wide Web's Data Self-Sovereignty Initiative

Under the establishment of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Berners-Lee has been studying how to fundamentally change today's Web applications from the perspective of data management. way of working. They developed a project called Solid.

Solid is short for "social linked data". This project includes a series of protocols and tools, Comply with the W3C standard specification and provide the following features:

· True data autonomy: decouple data from the applications that use it, ensuring users are free to choose where their data lives and who can access it , to control the duration of data authorization.

· Modular design: avoid platform lock-in, users can bring their generated data with them at any time, Migrating from one platform to another competing platform will not lose any data and social relationships in the process,

· Reuse existing data: developers use Existing data can be used to create new applications or improve old applications.

The specific details of Solid will be described later. But protocols and tools alone are not enough. Berners-Lee recently founded Inrupt to attract the attention of users and developers, trying to commercially prove that the Solid model is feasible.

Berners-Lee is Chief Technology Officer and Director of Inrupt, where John Bruce  Co-founder and CEO of the company. Bruce was previously co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity company Resilient, which was acquired by IBM.

Inrupt's core technology, It is also the core technology of the current Solid project, called Pods, a neutral, third-party personal online data store.

Its working principle is simply this: when a user uses an application connected to the Inrupt API, his personal data is stored in a pod inside. Users can manually choose which data to authorize for the app, and they can revoke these authorizations at any time when they no longer use the app or migrate platforms. Depending on the type and amount of authorized data, the application can provide users with different levels of services

.

But the most fundamental principle is that due to the existence of pods as a third-party data store, the developers of these applications will not be able to fully extract and sell this data.

Berners-Lee It is believed that Inrupt's technology can perform well in business forms such as medical care, finance, communications, government affairs and media.

Inrupt has also developed several products and provided relatively complete documentation. These products include:

· Enterprise Solid Server, an enterprise-oriented Pods server, can strengthen the The use of data enables the data that has been generated to exert new value.

· Solid client library, including a series of open source toolkits that allow developers to integrate Pods and other future Solid technologies into their applications.

PodBrowser, an open source application, allows users to visually view and manage data in Pods.

In addition, Inrupt has already gained support from a small number of developers, and some applications developed using Pods technology are already available.

Media Kraken, a movie review website, users can Track, rate and share your favorite movies and lists above. It is worth noting that its registration and login interface directly asks where the user wants to store the data. The options include Solid Pods, or directly stored in the browser, and the service provider will not extract the data.

Darcy, one under development The distributed social network platform in , functions a bit like Twitter and Facebook, but the core of its working model is not to obtain more user data to push advertisements. The product is open source, and users can own and control their own data.

Liqidchat, a simple IM application developed with Pods technology.

OhMyPod! and Inox, two Pods management apps created by third-party developers.

It can be seen that the relationship between Solid Technology and Inrupt is that the former is responsible for promoting a new generation based on the concept of data autonomy Open source Web data storage and usage technology, which is commercialized and promoted to more developers, companies, and ultimately more consumers can benefit.

Berners-Lee believes that today, there is a wall between users and the data they themselves create (and are extracted from) wall. People lack awareness of which data is extracted, have no control, and cannot prevent data extractors from reselling these data in the data market.

Currently, the Solid project has received support from some of the world's top institutions, including MasterCard. However, the world's top Internet companies we are familiar with have not made known public statements about Solid, Pods, and the concept of data autonomy.

In the past few years, these Internet companies have become the object of monopoly investigations in European and American countries. At last year’s hearings in the U.S. Congress on the four major technology companies Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, even the politicians who were the most indifferent to technology expressed their concern about their grabbing and using data to build commercial hegemony and monopoly walls. worry.

Nowadays the Internet has evolved into a cyberpunk look, but Berners-Lee is still an idealist. As a neutral third party, he is trying to promote data autonomy to be accepted by more people.

But considering the current industry situation, I am afraid that only those top companies can get the support-and this means that the business models they rely on to maintain their volume may have to be Complete subversion - Berners-Lee's ideas can be implemented, and the Web can be truly repaired.

Seeing this, you may not be able to help but ask, what is data autonomy? Data autonomy is an extension of data sovereignty, which is not a recent concept.

In 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice asked Microsoft to provide the content of user emails stored in Irish servers on the grounds of investigating terrorist organizations, but the company refused. In subsequent court battles, Microsoft largely won, establishing the concept of data sovereignty in a national context, meaning that data should abide by the laws and governance structures of the country in which it resides.

In the case of Microsoft vs US Department of Justice, the starting point for the protection of data sovereignty is the platform. Another movement that has sprung up in recent years starts from the creators of data themselves.

For a long time, in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and other countries, the local aborigines have particularly cherished the resources and rights of their own ethnic groups. For example, geological resources such as oil and natural gas that can be more easily exploited commercially in other areas must go through a very cumbersome approval process in indigenous areas to ensure that local people can enjoy their due rights.

For more than half a century, many social science investigations on indigenous peoples not only did not obtain their permission, but also did not report to them, resulting in Reinforcement of stereotypes and even discriminatory behavior.

In 2015, the Aboriginal data sovereignty movement emerged in Australia, and academics reached a consensus: under the framework of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the original Indigenous peoples should have control over their people's data and can decide how it is used. In 2017, the world's first Aboriginal data sovereignty protection organization "Maiam nayri Wingara and 

Torres Strait Islander Data Sovereignty Collective"[1] was officially established in Australia.

Under the logic of aboriginal data sovereignty, any data from aboriginal groups and regions, whether it is information recorded in private interviews or The collection of samples in nature requires the approval of the aboriginal group, and after use, the ownership will be returned to the aboriginal people for preservation.

Indigenous anthropologist Keolu Fox, assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, said: People need to understand that data is also a resource.

Poster of Indigenous Data Sovereignty Symposium

And if this concept of data sovereignty is extended to everyone, it will be With the concept of data autonomy. (English is still data sovereignty, just changed to a translation that is more suitable for the scene.)

In principle, everyone can (Berners-Lee thinks it should) Take full ownership and control of all your data. When Internet companies provide services to users, they should, in line with the principles of transparency, responsibility, and openness, declare which data to use and how to use it, and obtain full informed consent from users, instead of what most Internet users are now facing. A terrible experience of having to agree to a bunch of permissions from the provider in order to

use a service.

More importantly: users should be able to check at any time which data permissions the service provider is accessing. If a user wants to revoke access to certain data, or no longer uses the service, wants to delete data completely, or completely block the service provider's ability to access his data - he should be able to do it easily.

For most people, this should be what a more ideal relationship between user and service provider should look like. Unfortunately, at present, in front of some companies with network effects (such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, WeChat and other large social networking platforms and companies with key functions), users do not have much right to speak. Due to social reasons, they often have to use these products, and they can only hand over the data to the companies behind them.

In terms of user data rights protection, GDPR (EU General Data Protection Regulation) has done a good job. Although the process is slightly cumbersome, it at least provides legal permission for consumers who want to take back control of their data and delete their own data.

This is because GDPR is a means of checks and balances provided by large Internet companies that have already grabbed massive amounts of user data.

Through Inrupt, Berners-Lee wants to create a brand new, fundamentally open, transparent, and more importantly, fairer to users Data authorization and escrow mechanisms.

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