The inventors of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and John Bruce, through their company Inrupt, are changing the future of the Internet. Their vision is a future where users have more control over their data.
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Have more control over your data. No blockchain. And your personal artificial intelligence assistant like ChatGPT.
These are all part of the future vision of the web, according to Internet inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and CEO of Inrupt John Bruce, who spoke on CNBC’s Beyond The Valley podcast on Friday.
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Inrupt, the company they co-founded, aims to provide the Web inventors’ unique vision of how the Internet works.
Berners-Lee said when he invented the web in 1989: i have a website “
“The spirit of the web has been incredibly empowering for individuals,” he said.
However, in his view, since then something has gone wrong and power has become concentrated in the hands of large Internet companies.
“Come on, everyone, let’s go. Facebook, so they don’t have a website. They’re all on Mark Zuckerberg’s website,” Berners-Lee said.
“When people look up you on Facebook, you can’t really control what they see. Controls what news is given to them.
“It’s very powerless. It’s very useful for Facebook. It’s the ability to have power.”
Data management
what is his solution? Products that give users control over their data and how it is used. Internet companies now by default collect data about you as a way of using their services.
But Berners-Lee and Bruce’s startup Inrupt is going in a different direction. Its purpose is to provide users with single sign-on across various products and services on the Internet.
Data is stored in so-called “pods”. It’s basically an online storage container for personal data. An individual can grant a website or service access to a pod or silo of data instead of the website retrieving data by default.
The system is built on an open protocol on the Internet called Solid.
“And that’s the ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ of Inrupt, the empowerment of the individual, and the opportunity for individuals to take more command of their role on the web,” Bruce told CNBC’s Beyond The Valley.
Ideas like this need buy-in from the big internet players. But Bruce said there is an “endless struggle” from companies trying to get more data about their users so they can target them with their products and services. But the effort represents diminishing returns for companies, he said.
“Another way, instead of blindly deciding, ‘Are you a potential candidate for my product or service?’ why not ask you the right way? You tell me,” Bruce said, referring to the idea that users would be able to share the data they want with companies from their pods.
Users also need to change their behavior and have a desire to control their data in this way. Berners-Lee acknowledged that this change will not happen overnight, but “in small increments.”
Your personal AI assistant
In the wide Beyond The Valley episode, Bruce and Berners-Lee also talked about ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence product developed by OpenAI.
Backed by Microsoft ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot that answers questions from users.
According to Berners-Lee, when users have their own data pods, they can run their own AI, much like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri for personal versions.
Because in Berners-Lee’s future, users will store all sorts of data in pods, from fitness information to online shopping habits. AI will be able to use all that data to learn and help you.
“Sometimes you have the whole data spectrum. All the data has to do with collaborations, coffee, projects, dreams. .. and run AI on it.
Web3 or Web 3.0?
Everything Berners-Lee and Bruce are working on at Inrupt is part of the future of the Internet.
Some call it Web3, but proponents say it will be the decentralized version of the internet. Amazon, Microsoft, Google.
Many Web3 proponents suggest that it will be built on some sort of blockchain technology. Blockchain is a technology that was first revealed with Bitcoin, but has evolved since then.
But Berners-Lee is keen to call the next generation of the Internet Web 3.0, emphasizing the dot.
“It’s not blockchain,” he said.
Web3 proponents suggest blockchain could be used to underpin the future of the internet. But Berners-Lee says the technology isn’t fast enough and doesn’t provide enough privacy.
He also said that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are “no more than speculation.”
Gavin Wood, founder of blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies, coined the term “Web 3.0”.
Wood spoke to CNBC about his vision for the future of the web on a previous episode of Beyond the Valley last year. He advocated blockchain technology as part of the future web architecture.
