WORLD WIDE WEB INVENTOR WANTS DO-OVER

In 1980, during his off-hours as a consultant software engineer at CERN, the Swiss Particle Physics Laboratory, Sir Berners-Lee wrote a private program for storing information. He said the motivation was to mimic the way the human brain stores and accesses information.
The engineer’s work evolved to become utilized as a decentralized data retrieval system more famously known as the World Wide Web. But, now, Berners-Lee is working on what he hopes will one day supersede the current internet. He has formed a start-up called “Inrupt” to fix what the engineer sees as some of the problems that have plagued and disrupted the digital web he originally helped build.
He has pointed to closed platforms owned by huge corporations including Facebook and Twitter as an impetus for imagining something different. “People are fed up with the lack of controls, the silos.”
In a bit of irony or perhaps sly disruption, the announcement of “Inrupt” came via this Twitter post:

“Today, @johnwbruce and I will join @marjoriepaillon in conversation at this year’s @WebSummit Conference. We’ll discuss the ongoing work of @Inrupt and our efforts to change the way the web works, so it works better for us all.”

The company is reportedly already working on a pilot program and has signed up the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS), the BBC, and government services in Flanders, Belgium, to test its technology. One goal is to develop a single sign-on for any service and have personal data stored in “PODS,” or “personal online data stores” controlled by the individual user, instead of corporate entities.
Berners-Lee was dubbed a Knight Commander in the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth in 2004 for his technological accomplishments.