Solid is a platform that will allow users to store their data in a personal online data store, and then grant access to that data to different applications.
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"I invented the web, and I want to fix it. I want to make sure it's a platform for everybody, not just a few powerful companies."
"We need to fight for the right to privacy online. It's a fundamental human right."
"The most important thing for the web is to remain open and royalty-free."
"The web is for everybody. That's why it's called the World Wide Web."
"I never thought the web would grow to be this big. It's amazing."
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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This describes a system where you own your personal data in one central online storage pod, and you decide which applications can access it. Instead of Facebook owning your social data or Google owning your email, everything lives in a space you control. Apps request permission rather than hoarding your information. It restructures the web so data flows toward users, not away from them toward corporations.
Berners-Lee invented the open web in 1989 intending it to be decentralized and user-empowering. He watched with alarm as it became dominated by data-hoarding platforms. Solid, which he developed at MIT and later commercialized through Inrupt in 2017, is his direct attempt to reclaim that founding vision. For someone who gave the web away for free, engineering a system to return data sovereignty to individuals is a defining personal mission.
This quote emerged in the mid-to-late 2010s, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, GDPR's 2018 passage, and the rise of surveillance capitalism exposed how completely big tech had turned user data into a commodity. Facebook, Google, and Amazon had built data monopolies users could not escape. Public trust in platforms was collapsing. Solid was conceived as a structural fix — not better privacy policies, but a full architectural inversion of how data flows across the web.
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