Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web, said he doesn’t view blockchain as a viable solution for building the next iteration of the internet.
“In fact, Web3 is not the web at all,” he told an audience at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon.
Berners-Lee said people too often conflate Web3 with “Web 3.0,” his own proposal for reshaping the internet.
Berners-Lee said people too often conflate Web3 with “Web 3.0,” his own proposal for reshaping the internet. His new startup, Inrupt, aims to give users control of their own data, including how it’s accessed and stored. The company raised $30 million in a funding round in December, TechCrunch reported.
Berners-Lee says that our personal data is siloed by a handful of Big Tech platforms, like Google and Facebook, that use it to “lock us into their platforms.”
“The result was a big data race where the winner was the one corporation that controlled the most data and the losers were everybody else,” he said.
His new startup aims to address this through three ways:
- A global “single sign-on” feature that lets anyone log in from anywhere.
- Login IDs that allow users to share their data with others.
- A “common universal API,” or application programming interface, that lets apps pull data from any source.