Berners-Lee wants to get the internet back from Big Tech

The web's prime mover has a plan to decentralize power again

- PARMY OLSON

Tim Berners-Lee has a radical proposition. Instead of leaving our online data vulnerable to harvesting by large tech platforms and governments, we should control it. Our own little piece of the web or 'personal cloud' should need permission to be accessed. The idea sounds reasonable in theory, though in practice it's a big ask. The web today isn't the vibrant motley network that came into being after Berners-Lee first fashioned it in 1989, but a landscape dominated by huge companies like Alphabet's Google and Meta's Facebook. In many parts of the world, Facebook is the internet and the only experience that people have of the web. Most apps function as gatekeepers of our personal data.

Berners-Lee wants to flip that dynamic. Over the last decade or so, he's watched the web's evolution with dismay as we traded our data for greater conveniences, plugging into 'ecosystems' from Apple and Google so that we can seamlessly move our profiles between email clients and online browsers. The platforms insist they're protecting all that information and respecting our privacy, but Berners-Lee thinks that's not enough. Our data is scattered across Big Tech's servers and those of countless other companies, out of our control.