Tim Berners-Lee — "I'm working on a new project called Solid, which is designed to decentralize the…"
I'm working on a new project called Solid, which is designed to decentralize the web and give users more control over their data.
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More from Tim Berners-Lee
"I wish I had done more to make the web more resilient to abuse."
"The web is a powerful weapon. We need to make sure it's used for good."
"We need to reclaim the web from corporate and political interests."
"We need to make sure that everyone has access to the web. It's a basic human right."
"The web was designed to be decentralized, but it’s becoming more centralized."
About Tim Berners-Lee (born 1955)
British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989 and founded the W3C, championing open web standards. Closely associated with Vint Cerf (TCP/IP co-creator and 'father of the internet') and Marc Andreessen (Mosaic browser creator and Netscape co-founder). For an intellectual contrast, see Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook (Meta) founder — Zuckerberg's walled-garden Facebook is the canonical contemporary opposite of Berners-Lee's open-web vision; Berners-Lee's Solid project and 'recapture the web' essays are explicitly written as a rebuttal to the platform-monopoly model Facebook pioneered.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Berners-Lee describes his Solid project, a technical framework that separates personal data from the apps that use it. Instead of Facebook or Google owning your information, you store it in a personal data pod you control, granting apps selective access. This directly challenges surveillance capitalism—the model where platforms profit by harvesting user data without meaningful consent—and restores the individual as the true owner of their digital identity.
Relevance to Tim Berners-Lee
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN as an open, decentralized system he explicitly gave to the world royalty-free. By the 2010s, he publicly expressed regret watching it captured by data-hoarding platforms. He founded W3C to guard open standards and co-founded Inrupt in 2018 to commercialize Solid, directly trying to reclaim the web's founding principle: that it should empower individuals, not enable corporations to exploit them.
The era
The quote gained prominence around 2018, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed Facebook had harvested 87 million users' data for political targeting. That same year, Europe's GDPR took effect, granting users new data rights. Congressional hearings grilled tech CEOs, the #DeleteFacebook movement surged, and public awareness of surveillance capitalism peaked. Berners-Lee's Solid emerged as a technical counter-proposal at exactly the moment society was reckoning with who truly owns the web.
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