How can we fix the web and achieve information utopia?
The future of information democracy
The World Wide Web is broken, and its inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants to fix it.
The web is an information ecosystem and digital economy that has become a force for good. No-one would dispute the positive global effect of the web. It connects billions of people to information they didn’t realise existed, and the lives of individuals and communities around the world are improved through education, awareness, and commerce.
At the same time, the technology of the web and the data it holds has made it easier for crime and exploitation to exist such as fake news, the Dark Web, phishing, and money laundering. The continuing rise of data breaches is made possible in part because of how much of our data is on the web. We live in our own dystopian movie where algorithms impact the many but are controlled by the few.
Even with improved data privacy and protection policies like GDPR, by most measures we no longer control our data that powers the digital society we want to live in.
What Happened?
Since 1996 there have been two regimes of the World Wide Web and we are now entering the third. Web 1.0 was the interconnection of web pages, and we were amazed how quickly and freely we connected to an array of information. As that information grew directories were replaced by Web 1.0’s killer app — Google Search. In the early days web pages were grafted onto existing business systems and e-commerce was born.
With Web 2.0 user generated content and self-publication grew. People started with blogging, used on-line tools to edit photos, and then businesses began to analyse their vast amounts of data on the web as they became limited by their in-house capability. Social interaction of course exploded — with likes, comments, and photos and more. We expected much of this interaction for free, and the price of free was the walled garden megalith sites of Google, Facebook, Amazon and others. These businesses grew with advertising revenue built on the content we generated. The content we created was no longer in our control and we didn’t have a say in what could be done with it. This became the new normal for the majority of web users. The Web broke.
Berners-Lee now paints the vision for Web 3.0. He is emphatic that it is NOT the same thing as web3. That is fundamentally built around cryptocurrencies and blockchain which are in a large part designed for command and control of individual and institutional financial success.
Web 3.0 is the next regime of the World Wide Web. It is one where the foundations of how we interact with information is truly de-centralised. This means individuals are in control of their data and how it is used across the digital ecosystem.
Introducing Solid
Solid is a specification, a new Web standard. It will enable people to reclaim their autonomy and control their data and privacy. Individuals will choose the applications and services they want to use and allow them to access the data. Solid is a set of rules to standardise data exchange.
“Solid is the foundation for the democratisation of information for everyone.”
When you take a photo of your food on your smartphone it is accessed through Apple Photos or Google Photos and stored in their clouds. To share a photo or move it you direct the app to use the integrated proprietary share tool of the smartphone OS e.g., iOS Share to send in email, or in an Instagram post. Alternatively, you are in apps like Instagram or Facebook and take a photo and post. The photo (and the post) is now in Meta’s data store, and a copy to Apple or Google.
In all this you have achieved the goal of sharing a gastronomic delight with others in a social interaction. Now think about all the other types of data. Documents and images critical to your personal life: passport, driving licence, utility bills, medical records, credit card details. Businesses and governments today offer effortless ways for us to get things done through friction-less interactions through their apps (“just upload your passport here…”). But this comes at a price: copies of the data littered across the web in too many walled gardens.
Solid introduces “pods”. These are decentralised stores of your data where the individual can control application access to data in the pod. Decentralised in this context means the data is not controlled and managed by one entity. The data hosted in its pod can be exposed to any application that is granted access to it.
In a Solid pod, data as an entity becomes a first-class citizen on the World Wide Web. This means every piece of information in the pod has its own unique reference via a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). An example might be: https://mypod.com/jeremycaine/my-passport. This information is not public by default. You have a Web ID to assert access to that data by an application.
Previously we were registering with usernames (often email addresses because we could remember them) and passwords for each site we visited. Then standards like OpenID emerged so that you could trust an identity provider (e.g., Google, Apple, Facebook) to log you into an application (e.g., Adobe Creative Cloud) and OAuth to let an application access something somewhere else (e.g., file on your Google Drive).
Web IDs will become the new way in which you identify yourself on the web and control your data. Applications that want to access and use your data also have a Web ID to do that. The Web ID will point to information (a profile document) that describes the access permissions of an application e.g., read or write on a particular resource such as a file or dataset in a database.
You can have as many Solid pods as you like, each hosted on a pod provider you choose. Your identity links the data you have, irrespective how a particular pod handles it. Through your identity and your authorisations, a disparate set of applications can access and manipulate your data. In the Web 3.0 world you tell the applications where your passport details are, and they go and get the information they need — as opposed to copying your passport data into multiple proprietary data silos. The data is not the master copy, it is the only copy.
The Evolution of Web 3.0
The progression of Web 3.0 is going to be like Web 1.0. Just like the early days of web servers and browser and their implementation of the HTTP protocol and HTML standards compliance, so there will be the evolution of Solid specification-based technology. The original CERN httpd web server made way for many others and the rise of Apache Web Server. The same will be for Solid pod providers. As is often with W3C standards progress is slow to evolve from Draft to Release status. This is important because they have an obligation to satisfy a mass consumption general use case and there are many engineering nuances to get right.
The Web 3.0 opportunity will not wait. There are already a few open-source projects and commercialisation with companies like Inrupt (founded by Tim Berners-Lee and John Bruce) and their enterprise ready products. Pod providers will also be Web ID providers, and standalone identity providers will no doubt evolve to offer WebID services.
The computing industry is now well practiced in its approach to engineering complex technologies in the open and fostering their adoption. Just think about Linux, Kubernetes, machine learning, modern programming languages and the myriad of projects that surround them.
There will be at least three areas of development to next evolve Web 3.0.
First, will the current standards be enough? To solve for this new system engineering there will likely be new and combinations of standards, yet their consumption needs to be made straightforward. Reflecting on how Service Oriented Architecture evolved with corresponding multi-layered XML standards (mostly driven by middleware vendors like IBM and Microsoft). That model eventually broke and re-organised to a simpler developer-led model of REST and API implementations. Yet, SOA remains a sound architectural construct for engineering complex systems.
Next, what business models will emerge? Individually, today we might get by with a collection of free tier cloud storage accounts with Dropbox and Google Drive. The data we store here is the tip of the iceberg. Once we realise the historic data we want to hold like fitness, health, or financial data, and at least some slice of our social data then we will realise the volume of data we need to protect. The applications that come to your pods will not just want to access your data; their value-add transactions will contribute data to your pod. Pod providers will not be able to operate at scale for free. New multi-sided platform economics will emerge and some entities in the value-chain will ultimately pay for the exchanges of data.
Then, as the mass adoption grows what will be the computer science, platform engineering practices and innovation that will emerge? Like all new technology shifts there will be above-the-line consumption engineering and below-the-line provision engineering. As cloud makes way for hybrid multi-cloud and sky computing the homogeny of data exchange and movement will become more important. With machine learning, the model and training data sets rule. What happens when the data sets are in part under our control, will there be less innovation speed because of a more federated approach to assembling those data sets?
Conclusion
The Solid movement is a re-organisation of data consumption for positive effect in our world. Time will tell whether data will move to a decentralised utopia or stay where it is controlled and accessed in this new way. Whoever hosts the data cannot do it for free, and freemium and advertising-based business models will be tested.
It is the pioneering period for Web 3.0. We have come full circle from the original ethos of utopian access to information. Right now, the uplift of our awareness and adoption of personal data sovereignty is evolutionary. Microsoft’s Nadella recently observed that blockchain, web3 and metaverse need their ‘ChatGPT moment’. Web 3.0 also needs its moment, its killer app.
Solid is the foundation for the democratisation of information for everyone. With that, Web 3.0 will create a positive digital society.
(Views in this article are my own.)
