Universal Linked Info-System
Services Are Indebted to Users: Realizing Tim Berners-Lee's Vision of Data Ownership
In his original 1989 proposal for what would become the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee outlined a vision of a "universal linked information system" where users would have control over their own data. He foresaw a decentralized architecture where information would be stored in "nodes" that users could link together through "links" in whatever way made sense to them.
"The system must allow any sort of information to be entered. Another person must be able to find the information, sometimes without knowing what he is looking for." - Tim Berners-Lee, 1989
User-Controlled Data Silos
Berners-Lee envisioned that in this system, users would each have their own repository of data - their own "node" or what we might now call a data silo. Services and applications would then request access to specific subsets of that data as needed to provide value to the user. The service would be "indebted" to the user for giving them access to the necessary data.
"The owner of the data can be given control of what is accessible to who." - Tim Berners-Lee, 1989
Contrasting with the Current Model
This contrasts with the prevalent model today, where services are the primary collectors and owners of user data, often harvesting it without clear consent. Users are beholden to the services to manage their data and have little portability. Berners-Lee saw the opposite - users would have ultimate control and services would be beholden to them.
"The owner of the data can be given control of what is accessible to who." - Tim Berners-Lee, 1989
Realizing the Vision: Solid and Beyond
Innovative projects today like Solid, run by Berners-Lee himself, are trying to bring this original vision to fruition. In the Solid ecosystem, users store their data in a personal online datastore (pod) and then give services permission to read or write to subsets of that data as required.
This flips the script - rather than user data being fragmented across dozens of services that the user has little insight into or control over, the data stays with the user and the user chooses which services can access it. The services are indebted to the user, not the other way around.
The Profound Shift
While we are still far from realizing this vision at web scale, it's a powerful idea that is motivating many in the decentralized web space. As Berners-Lee wrote prophetically in 1989:
"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities."
By putting users back in control of their data and making services requesters rather than owners of that data, we can start to rebalance the debt that has accumulated in our current system. Services, indebted to the users whose data they need, will have to provide real value to earn and maintain access to that data. It's a profound shift, but one that takes us closer to the original vision of the web's creator.