Tim Berners-Lee Announces Dissolution of WorldWide Web Foundation

TapTechNews October 1st news, after 15 years, Rosemary Leith, the co-founder of the WorldWide Web Foundation (WF), and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, announced that their mission has been completed and WF is about to close.

Both said that the foundation was established in 2009, when only one-fifth of the people in the world could access the Internet. Fifteen years later, nearly 70% of the people in the world can already access the Internet, and many similar non-governmental organizations are also working to make the Internet more accessible and cheaper.

The two founders first thanked all the people who have supported them over the years, enabling us to make significant progress in ease of use and affordability, and they insisted that the problems faced by the modern network (Web 2.0) have changed and believe that other advocacy organizations can take over the responsibilities of WF.

They believe that one of the most pressing issues now is the social media business model, where those platforms commodify user data and centralize platform power too much, which goes against Berners-Lee's original vision of the network. In order to address this issue, he announced that he will dissolve WF in order to focus on decentralized technologies, such as the Solid technology, hoping to return the control of personal data to individuals.

Our conclusion is that Tim's passion for restoring individuals' ownership and control of data and actively building strong collaborative systems should be the top priority for future work. To best achieve this, Tim will focus on supporting his vision of the Solid protocol and other decentralized systems.

TapTechNews note: Solid is short for Social Linked Data, and is sometimes also called Web 3.0. This project has developed a distributed network platform for applications that require linked data, which is completely controlled by users, not by other organizations or individuals. It aims to fundamentally change the way web applications work to achieve true data ownership for everyone and improve privacy conditions.

This protocol has been in development since 2015 and is consistent with the open letter written by Berners-Lee in 2023, in which he emphasized the urgent need to restore a decentralized, user-controlled Internet. Berners-Lee has repeatedly said that the Internet has been dominated by the private interests of several (leading) companies.