Sir Tim is also not content to let (wonderful as they might be) matters lie. From Wired this morning:
…When Berners-Lee created the web, it was a decentralized platform. Anyone could publish a website and link to any other site. But as the web has grown from an obscure research-sharing tool for the scientific community into a global medium for commerce, communication, journalism, and entertainment, the power dynamics have shifted. Today, huge companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Netflix dominate the web. These corporate giants enjoy an enormous amount of control not only over what people see and do online but over users’ private data. These days, Berners-Lee is working to reverse that trend as the co-lead of the Decentralized Information Group at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL).
On the better web Berners-Lee envisions, users control where their data is stored and how it’s accessed. For example, social networks would still run in the cloud. But you could store your data locally. Alternately, you could choose a different cloud server run by a company or community you trust. You might have different servers for different types of information – for health and fitness data, say – that is completely separate from the one you use for financial records.
“It’s kind of like when you had floppy disks and you had one disk for the application and another the storage,” he says.…
Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the Web, Plots a Radical Overhaul of His Creation has the whole story.
N.B.: Wired has a massive bug up… about ad blockers. If you want to read the article, you have to disable ad blockers to do so. You’ve been warned.
