Berners-Lee at CERN, outside Geneva, Switzerland, 1994. PHOTOGRAPH © 1994–2018 CERN.



In 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web ("the Web") to improve  information sharing between scientists and universities across the world. Berners-Lee quickly realized the Web could be used by everyone.  An information utopia, of sorts: a place where everyone could be empowered with all the best information.

But, rather than empower individuals, the Web has primarily empowered tech giants.  Per Vanity Fair:

We, collectively, by the billions, gave it away with every signed user agreement and intimate moment shared with technology. Facebook, Google, and Amazon now monopolize almost everything that happens online, from what we buy to the news we read to who we like. Along with a handful of powerful government agencies, they are able to monitor, manipulate, and spy in once unimaginable ways.

By 2015, Berners-Lee had become increasingly dismayed by how the Web and personal data were being abused (e.g., Russian hackers, Facebook/Cambridge Analytica). He founded the Solid open source project at MIT, which enables each consumer to store their data in a Personal Online Data Store (or PODS), and consumers would have control over which applications accessed data in their PODS.

In 2018, Berners-Lee co-founded Inrupt, a company with a mission to "provide commercial energy and an ecosystem to help protect the integrity and quality of the new web built on Solid."  Inrupt has successfully raised over $46M of venture capital funding to-date, and Berners-Lee has recently been in the headlines, like:

·Euronews, 11/21/22: "Inventor of the Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee wants to save your data from Big Tech with Web3.0"

·CNN, 12/16/22:  "Inventor of the world wide web wants us to reclaim our data from tech giants"

Inrupt & Fog Works Share a Common Vision

What Berners-Lee realized is, the Web has fundamentally created an agency problema conflict of interest inherent in any relationship where one party is expected to act in the best interest of another.  If most of our purchases, searches, or social networking is kept and de-facto owned by Amazon, Google, and Facebook, can we expect them to safeguard our data from breaches? Or consistently act in our best interests, instead of their own interest of profit maximization?  Unfortunately, the answer to both of these questions is the same:  No.

The primary (and perhaps only) way to minimize or eliminate this agency problem is to radically restructure who controls and owns the data.

In Web2, tech giants collect, control, and de-facto own billions of consumers' data.  The collection of this data also creates a massive target for hackers.  The bigger the trove of data, the greater the incentive for a hacker to hack.
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