The writer is inventor of the World Wide Web and co-founder of Inrupt and the Open Data Institute
People sometimes ask me how I think the World Wide Web is doing 35 years after its invention, and I have to admit, like them, to reservations. Reservations of two sorts: the dysfunctional nature of some aspects of it, but also wistfulness — the challenge of yet unrealised promise. Both are important, but we tend to focus on the evident threats to the detriment of the unrealised things that could be built.
We should start with the things we need to fix. At the top of the list is the polarisation of opinion in the huge set of people who use social media. We know the mechanism inside this involves a company whose bottom line is determined by the time people spend on a platform. When the platform sets up the selection feed to optimise for engagement, the feed selects things that make people angrier and serves them progressively more extreme views.
Changing the algorithm to make it benevolent rather than polarising is easy for those who control the platforms. Plenty of social media companies, — such as Pinterest, for example — allow people to engage and discuss ideas without promoting toxic content. While I feel regulation should be a last resort, in this case the industry has not self-regulated. There is harm being done to our young people and to the online public square where humanity gathers. I would encourage governments to provide legislation and regulation around this.
Now let us talk about the opportunity to build new systems that are better for society and for individuals. When the web started, you could make your own website so long as you had a computer and an internet connection (admittedly back then this was a big proviso). You could get a domain name like abc.com and put whatever you liked there. You could blog, and link to other blogs. You were part of an incredibly valuable thing from which you seemed to contribute a tiny bit and gain a great deal.
That feeling of personal empowerment we sometimes call digital sovereignty has since been lost. How did we get here?
The answer is bit by bit, as a result of the natural application of markets and monopolies. We allowed each social media platform to build an unscalable garden wall with our data trapped inside. We did not insist that we could share our Facebook photos with our LinkedIn colleagues, for example. Nor did we insist that we could use the same identity and transfer the same friend list from Instagram to X and then to Reddit.
This is the system that we already have for email — that’s why you can have an email group that includes people using different providers such as Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo.
We need the same sort of interoperability in social media.
One way to do this is to mandate that social network platforms follow new standards. Another is to quietly build an alternative world using these standards and let people realise that it is better — just as they did when leaving restricted online services AOL and Prodigy for the freedom of the web.
The Open Data Institute that I co-founded in London has taken on the challenge of international co-ordination for a new standard that gives users control over their own data. It is called Solid (for social linked data) and the technical details are controlled by W3C, the web standards consortium.
Solid seeks to decentralise the web. The platform can be used to build new applications that request access to user data. This data is stored in such a way that users have complete control over it.
The power of these tools isn’t limited to social media. I co-founded Inrupt to build a data wallet on top of Solid that can store everything from your driving licence to photos to medical data.
If you have all your data in one area, you can make links between it. That’s where the real magic happens, where insights between different data points can be seen. A recent study showed financial transaction data could help to flag ovarian cancer, for example, by spotting that people were managing symptoms by buying products like pain and indigestion medication.
The next level is to make these data insights accessible to everyone via artificial intelligence agents. But in order not to repeat the worst mistakes of the social media era, we need to make sure these agents really work for you, with your best interests in mind. That’s why Inrupt is building Charlie — an AI agent that uses data from the Solid wallet to generate personalised answers.
This is my vision for a new interface between users and the web — the evolution from ChatGPT, Gemini, Pi and DeepSeek. We have shown what is technically possible — now we need to show the force of social linked data to empower people all over the world.
