The 'Decentralized Web' Gets a Shot in the Arm From Tim Berners-Lee's New Platform, Solid

‘We’ve reached a critical tipping point’

The gauntlet has been thrown.

The same day Facebook announced its latest breach, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who is best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, announced his latest venture, Solid, an open-source platform built to decentralize the web.

As it stands, the web runs like an app on the internet to provide an interface for end users. A decentralized web, on the other hand, uses peer-to-peer communication—like one smartphone to another—to allow users to store and exchange information without an intermediary like Facebook, Google or Amazon.

In a blog post, Berners-Lee said he has taken sabbatical from MIT and reduced his daily involvement with the standards organization the World Wide Web Consortium to focus on his new startup, Inrupt, which is the company behind Solid.

Berners-Lee

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