Tim Berners-Lee unveils Solid, an open source project to decentralize the web and give users control of their data, and Inrupt, a startup to guide the project
I've always believed the web is for everyone. That's why I and others fight fiercely to protect it.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the founding document of Berners-Lee's second act: after decades watching the open web consolidate into platform silos, he answers with Solid, an open-source protocol that moves personal data out of corporate servers and into user-controlled stores, plus Inrupt, the startup charged with making adoption happen.
The seven years of coverage that follow trace both halves of the bet: Inrupt raised over $10M in 2019 to operationalize the protocol, shipped an enterprise version of the Solid privacy platform for organizations building privacy-focused apps, piloted with the UK's National Health Service, and by late 2024 was trialing a digital wallet for 7M Belgian citizens to receive social services — even as a 2025 review of Berners-Lee's memoir notes Inrupt still struggles to scale.
First-order effects
- Developers gain an open-source alternative to building on centralized platforms: Solid lets apps read and write to data stores the user controls, with Inrupt positioned as the steward of the spec and its ecosystem.
- Berners-Lee himself shifts from standards advocate to founder, putting commercial weight behind decentralization rather than leaving it to committees.
Second-order effects
- Institutions rather than consumers emerge as the beachhead market — the NHS pilots and the Belgian government wallet show hospitals and states adopting Solid-style data control where individual users won't switch en masse.
- Platform businesses whose economics rest on aggregating user data now face a credible counter-architecture, forcing the privacy debate from policy into protocol design.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, personal data migrates from siloed platform databases to interoperable user-held stores that apps request access to — but Inrupt's difficulty scaling suggests decentralized protocols may need public-sector anchor tenants before consumer markets follow.
- The longer arc points toward trust infrastructure becoming a layer of the web itself, with governments and health systems as the buyers who fund it.
The trend: The web's data layer is being re-architected around user-held stores and institutional trust frameworks, with Berners-Lee's Solid the longest-running attempt to make decentralization operational rather than rhetorical.