To say that Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet is, of course, an exaggeration. Thousands of people over the years have contributed to the technology, standards and practices that created the Internet. But it is a testament to his hard work and intelligence that the statement is not a ridiculous exaggeration. Berners-Lee’s contributions are at the heart of the original internet and form the core of the internet as we know it today. Berners-Lee has been very protective of the network he helped create, standing up for net neutrality and generally trying to make it a force for freedom and individuality rather than oppression and conformity. Today, he is trying to architect a system that will redeem the internet. Unfortunately, Berners-Lee’s new program is going to fail.
Berners-Lee and his group at MIT are trying to create a system that allows users to control the oil of the information age: user data. They have begun the process of building a tool and set of apps called Solid. Solid is meant to giver users back control of their data and take it away from places like Google and Facebook:
On the better web Berners-Lee envisions, users control where their data is stored and how it's accessed. For example, social networks would still run in the cloud. But you could store your data locally. Alternately, you could choose a different cloud server run by a company or community you trust. You might have different servers for different types of information—for health and fitness data, say—that is completely separate from the one you use for financial records.
This is the wrong problem. Or, more precisely, this is a hammer-and-nail issue. Since Tim Berners-Lee and his team are exceptional technologists, every problem looks like a technological problem. But the problem with the web today is not one primarily of centralization of data. Centralization of data does make the misuse of data easier, but it is truly the misuse of data that is the problem. De-centralizing that data is not very likely to end the abuses.
Actors like the Russian government can influence small but critical groups of voters because of micro-targeting. Advertisers can create discriminatory ads on platforms like Google and Facebook because no one forces those systems to obey the law and so micro-targeting is allowed to run amok. Companies like Amazon and Facebook can collect such huge amounts of data because the law allows them to. De-centralizing the data will solve none of these problems automatically.
Solid assumes that you can store your own data and therefor control who has access for it for what purposes. As a practical matter, this is unlikely to be true. First, the creation of data stores is not the simplest thing in the world, so Solid will have to do that for you. So Solid creates a push button system to create a Solid data store, maybe even some programs to make populating that data easy. Now what? Well, now you have to be technically savy enough to find a host, find the Solid software, run it and troubleshoot it when and if there are issues. You then have to be technologically savy enough to load your data and to manage your permissions, security, etc. All of these can be made easier by the Solid applications, but none of them are commonplace skills, even today.
Even if you can do all of that you then have an ongoing cost. Storing something on the web is not free. Someone has to pay for the storage, or you have to run the storage out of a server in your basement, an even harder technical task than running and setting up software. Even assuming people are willing to pay for storing their data and willing to invest the time necessary to properly manage their security and permissions, the people who do so must be a cost, in time and treasure. By requiring that cost, you are limiting the number of people – and the kinds of people - -that can partake in this new world of decentralized data. Inevitably, then, this will fail.
It will fail not necessarily because not enough people will be willing or able to pay that cost (though I think that most likely) but because most people will do what they do today. They will happily avoid that cost by letting someone else control their data. Five minutes after Solid becomes popular enough to affect data broker/advertiser business, Amazon and Google and Microsoft will offer consumer Solid solutions for free, all nice and neatly stored on their clouds. And the price of this free Solid storage will be just that they can use your data anyway they want. And why not? We as a society already make that deal in exchange for stupid memes, decent search, and the ability to “connect” with some half-forgotten cousin or twerp from high school we never really liked anyway.
Nothing in the Solid system will prevent the above scenario, because this is not a technological problem. If you want to solve the problems that come with the use of personal data then you are going to have to attack the behavior, not the technology. You have to limit what can be collected from whom by law. You have to ban micro-targeting by law. You have to give users absolute control of their data by law. You have to prevent data transfers or use of personal data without express consent for each and every data-based transfer or transaction by law. You have to, in other words, be willing to upend a very powerful business model via the power of the state and ensure that the sate enforces those regulations. You cannot create a technical solution and hope it drives out the other technologies. That is the same fairytale that got us into this mess in the first place.
Tim Berners-Lee is one of the few people living today that can be honestly described as a genius (and no, Zuckerberg and Musk are not on that list). Solid is likely going to be a first-rate system and may even have some impact around the edges. But it won’t save the internet, because it isn’t addressing the root of the problem. The Internet fails society because the incentives all run towards monetizing attention and user data, regardless of societal impact. Until you change those incentives via moral persuasion or government regulation, no technology is going to have anything more than a minimal impact. Solid is a technological hammer when we really need a societal, systematic screw driver.