Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the long road back to an open web

Illustration: TBS

How do you fix something that changed the world and became so large that it is now out of your control? Sir Tim Berners-Lee is now trying to find an answer to this question. The man who gave humanity the World Wide Web in 1989 now wants to save it — from itself.

In a recent profile story by The New Yorker magazine, Berners-Lee shared his concerns about what the web has become and his plans to restore it to its founding ideals. It is a rare moment when an inventor returns to overhaul his own creation, but Berners-Lee has never been one for ownership.

Three decades ago, he refused to patent his invention so that everyone could use it freely. Today, he is fighting to reclaim that same freedom for the users who have lost control of their digital lives.

In his essay for The Guardian, Berners-Lee recently wrote that when he first proposed the web at Cern, he imagined it as a platform for "sharing, not exploitation." His vision was to build a universal space where anyone could publish, read, and collaborate without barriers.

That decision changed everything. It meant that anyone, anywhere, could build websites and applications without paying fees or seeking licences. The internet flourished and connected billions.

Yet the openness that once made it thrive also made it vulnerable. Over time, a handful of powerful platforms captured the web's traffic, data, and profits. "We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users' private data," Berners-Lee wrote, warning that people had gone from being users to becoming "the product."

A new foundation

The New Yorker article reveals that Berners-Lee's plan to rebuild the web rests on a project called the social linked data, or the "Solid" protocol. It is his attempt to give people control of their personal data – something he believes was lost during the rise of the platform economy. Solid separates users' data from the applications they use.

Instead of being stored in corporate silos, data lives in personal online data stores, or "Pods." Each person owns their Pod, deciding who can access it and how it is used.

"We can build a new world in which we get the functionality of things like Facebook and Instagram," Berners-Lee told The New Yorker. "And we don't need to ask for permission." To accelerate adoption, he co-founded a company called Inrupt in 2017. The firm develops tools and servers to make Solid practical for large organisations. Governments and institutions, including the National Health Service in the United Kingdom and the regional government of Flanders in Belgium, have tested Solid-based systems to give citizens more control over their digital identities and health records.

It is, in many ways, a continuation of his lifelong commitment to openness. Where others might have tried to monetise privacy, Berners-Lee is building infrastructure that returns it. Yet he is aware of the scale of the challenge. Platforms like Google, Meta, and Amazon dominate not only through technology but through habit. People are accustomed to convenience, even at the cost of autonomy. As one BBC executive told The New Yorker, "People say they want to be more in control of their data. But do they then want to be more hands-on? Not really."

An AI that works for you

Berners-Lee is also looking ahead to artificial intelligence. He believes the mistakes of the social media age must not be repeated in the AI era. In The Guardian, he proposed a thought experiment from 2017 called Charlie, an AI assistant designed to serve the user rather than exploit their data. "Charlie works for you like your doctor or your lawyer," he wrote. "Why can't the same frameworks be adopted for AI?"

At Inrupt, Berners-Lee's team has developed a prototype that uses Solid Pods to inform AI models securely. Instead of sending personal information to corporations, Charlie uses data stored in the user's own Pod to deliver personalised responses while keeping that data private. It is an elegant inversion of the current model, where the AI serves you, not the company.

Yet, as The New Yorker notes, the timing may be tight. Big tech firms have already moved towards AI-driven ecosystems. Google and OpenAI are integrating generative systems into search and commerce. Visa, one of the companies Inrupt has spoken to, believes "agentic" AIs will soon make financial decisions for consumers. The question Berners-Lee keeps asking is – who will those agents work for?

Returning to the original promise

Berners-Lee has spent decades watching the open system he created become fragmented and manipulated. The algorithms that promised connection have instead deepened isolation. The platforms that promised community now mediate public life for profit. He sees it as a design problem. "There's still time," he writes in his forthcoming memoir This Is for Everyone, "to build machines that serve the human, that promote the dignity of our fragile species on this isolated globe."

That line echoes the message he typed across the 2012 London Olympics stadium: "This is for everyone." It was a principle that he believed in – the web must belong to all, not to a few.

At seventy, Berners-Lee is still writing code, still tinkering, still dreaming of a better version of his creation. He told The New Yorker that he often thinks of the early days at Cern, when collaboration was the only way forward. The task now is not so different; it is about finding that collective will again.