Today, I’m talking with a very special guest: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Tim is a legend in the history of the internet.
He created HTML, the standard language for creating and structuring web pages, and the HTTP protocol that allows those pages to communicate using browsers and servers. It doesn’t really get more foundational than that — Tim was there at the very, very beginning of the modern internet.
But right now, in a lot of ways, it feels like maybe we’re sitting at the end of that grand, world-changing project. Tim has been sounding the alarm about where the web has gone wrong for years now. You can go back and read headline after headline to see his increasingly dire warnings about what’s happened to life on the internet, from the concentration of power in Big Tech platforms to the detrimental effects of social media.
Now, Tim is not exactly a pessimist — you’ll hear in our conversation that he still has a lot of optimism about the web and what it can do. But he’s also concerned that we’ve strayed too far from his original vision of the web as a democratizing force for knowledge and creativity.
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All of that plays a major thematic role in his new memoir, This is For Everyone, which is about the growth of the web and how he thinks we might be able to salvage its best parts and make something better. You’ll hear Tim explain that the title itself, coined as part of a segment he contributed to the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London, is kind of the purest distillation of what he’s always wanted the web to be. And he sincerely believes in it.
So Tim joined the show to talk about all of that, as well as his current work at the decentralization startup Inrupt which works on the open source Solid standard, and, of course, where AI fits into the conversation about the future of the web. Tim has for a long time been talking about an idea called the Semantic Web, or a web that’s readable and traversable by machines, and so you’ll hear him explain here why he’s excited about generative AI and in particular personalized assistants, including one he helped develop himself at Inrup called Charlie.
We’ve spent a great deal of our time here on Decoder over the last couple of years talking through the implications of AI for the open web generally, and more broadly how closed ecosystems have diminished the power of the web as an information platform, even as it’s become a rich application layer for the internet. Everywhere you look, though, AI is threatening the web in new and interesting ways. There’s the rise of Google’s AI-powered search results, the new browser wars happening between OpenAI and its competitors, and a full-on breakdown of the web’s social contract thanks to AI firms hungry for training data they’d rather not pay for.
So I really wanted to dig into this with Tim to see whether he believes the spirit in which he invented the web could somehow be reborn in the era we live in today. That vision was one where inventors, academics and the open source community collaborated with the tech industry to build something bigger than any one product or platform. And even though they may not have all agreed on what direction the web should take, they were all incentivized to join together on big initiatives like the W3C standards body Tim founded more than three decades ago.
Could something like that ever happen again, and could it happen for an AI-powered web? And is there a future where decentralization wrestles some power away from Big Tech and back to the end user? I think you’ll find Tim’s perspective here really insightful.
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