Pod Insights Decoder Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web About this episode Today, I’m talking with a very special guest: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Tim is a legend in the history of the internet. He created HTML and HTTP. It doesn’t really get more foundational than that — Tim was there at the very very beginning of the modern internet.
He also has a new memoir out called This Is For Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web. So Tim joined the show to talk about the state of the web, as well as his current work at the decentralization startup Inrupt, and, of course, where AI fits into the conversation.
Read the full interview on The Verge.
Links:
This Is For Everyone | Macmillan
The Semantic Web | W3C
Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, now wants to save it | The New Yorker
Why I gave the world wide web away for free | The Guardian
Amazon, Perplexity kick off the great AI web browser fight | The Verge
Web War III | The Verge
Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’ | The Verge
Cloudflare will now block AI crawlers by default | The Verge
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Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Transcript 10,379 words · 11 speakers
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1:31 Speaker 04 Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with a very special guest, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Tim is a legend in the history of the Internet. He created HTML, the standard language for creating and structuring webpages, and the HTTP protocol that browsers and servers used to communicate. It doesn't really get more foundational than that. Tim was there at the very, very beginning of the modern Internet. But right now, in a lot of ways, it feels like maybe we're at the end of that grand, world-changing project. Tim has been sounding the alarm about where the web has gone wrong for years now. You can go back and read headline after headline to see his increasingly dire warnings about what's happened to life on the Internet, from the concentration of power
2:16 Speaker 04 in big tech platforms to the detrimental effects of social media. Now, Tim isn't exactly a pessimist. You'll hear in our conversation that he still has a lot of optimism about the web and what it can do. But he's also concerned that we've strayed too far from his original vision of the web as a democratizing force for knowledge and creativity. All of that plays a major thematic role in his new memoir, This is for Everyone!, which is about the growth of the web and how he thinks we might be able to salvage its best parts and make something better. You'll hear Tim explain the title itself, was coined as part of a segment he contributed to the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London. It's kind of the purest distillation of what he's always wanted the web to be, and he sincerely believes in it.
3:01 Speaker 04 So Tim and I talked about all of that, as well as his current work at the decentralization startup Interrupt, which works on the open-source solids standard, and of course, where AI fits into this conversation about the future of the web. Tim has for a long time been talking about an idea he's called the semantic web, or a web that's readable and traversable by machines. And so you'll hear him explain here why he's excited about generative AI, and in particular, personal assistants, including one that he helped develop at Interrupt called Charlie. We've spent a lot of time here on Decoder over the past couple of years, talking through the implications of AI for the open web generally, more broadly, how closed ecosystems have diminished the web as an information platform, even though it's increased its importance as an application layer.
3:45 Speaker 04 Everywhere you look, though, AI is threatening the web in new and interesting ways. There's the rise of Google's AI-powered search results, the new browser wars happening between OpenAI and its competitors, and a full-on breakdown of the web's social contract, thanks to AI firms hungry for trading data they'd rather not pay for. So I really wanted to dig into all of this with Tim, to see whether he believes whether the spirit in which he invented the web could somehow be reborn in the era we live in today. That vision was one where inventors, academics, and the open-source community collaborated with the tech industry to build something bigger than any one product or platform. And even though they may not have all agreed on what direction the web should take, they all had huge incentives to join together on big initiatives, like the W3C Web Standards
4:28 Speaker 04 Body that Tim founded more than three decades ago. Could something like that ever happen again? And could it happen for an AI-powered web? Is there a future where decentralization wrestles some power away from big tech and back to the end user? I think you'll find Tim's perspective here really insightful. Okay, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, here we go.
5:02 Speaker 04 Sir Tim Berners-Lee, you are the inventor of the World Wide Web and co-founder and CTO of Inrupt. Welcome to Decoder.
5:08 Speaker 05 Thank you for having me.
5:10 Speaker 04 You are also the author of a new memoir called This Is For Everyone, which is about the web and the future of the web. I have a lot to talk to you about. I was just reflecting before we began this conversation that my entire career exists because of the web and the democratic access to publishing that the web afforded me and millions of other people. And that feels like it's all changing. The frame that I use when I talk to everybody at the web is that if we were starting The Verge today, I don't know that we would start a website. In 2011, when we started our site, it was the only choice. That was the thing that we were definitely going to do. We were going to start a big website with lots of functionality. And over the past 14 years, it feels like the thing we would do today is start like
5:53 Speaker 04 a video channel on a closed platform, like a walled garden platform. And I just wanted to ask you from the start, do you see that shift? That new information is most often going into closed platforms versus the open web? And how do you feel about that broadly? Because that's the shift that I think I feel the most.
6:09 Speaker 05 Well, I see a lot of things which are, you know, a lot of things end up on YouTube, which is on the web. So things in general, most of the things I'm involved in, they end up on the web. But people might constantly, sort of, you know, New York Times is constantly saying, "Please download the app." Or BBC says, "Please use the app." They were trying to persuade you to use the app because then they have more control, they can track you better. But also, there's, with podcasts particularly, I use a podcast program, a generic podcast app, which I can listen to any podcast with. And so that, for me, that's like, you know, the web as it should be.
6:53 Speaker 05 I can, you can send me a link to a podcast, or you can, you know, I can search for it, and I can put it in my, I can keep track of all... Hundreds of podcasts I'm interested in on, uh, it's, it's a bit like keeping, uh, some bookmarks on their first browser, original browser. And so you, uh, to a certain extent, podcasts, they work well, but if people end up on the app and then being tracked and not using the podcast app, they're not, they're not so. All that tension is, is, is huge right now for the web. Yes.
7:27 Speaker 04 There's a reason I want to start there because I think understanding how you feel about it will inform so much of, of the questions I have for you. That tension between YouTube is on the web, but all the videos on YouTube are, are not available in other players, right? There, there's no ecosystem of open YouTube players that can access that database of videos. Podcasts are really interesting. Apple effectively maintains a central database of, of podcasts and all the podcast players use it for discovery. And so that tension between where does a centralization lie and where does the open ecosystem live and what's the relation between the two of them? To me, it feels like the centralized players always
8:08 Speaker 04 end up exerting more and more dominance over the ecosystem, right? And maybe that has been inexorable over the past few years, but I'm curious how you see it.
8:16 Speaker 05 Well, when you have a market and a network, then you end up with monopolies. Now that's the way markets work. So bit by bit, we've seen difference originally, you know, yeah, there was a time before Chrome was totally dominant, when there was a reasonable market for different browsers. Now people, Chrome is dominant, there was a time before Google where search came along, that there were a number of search engines and so on. But now we have basically one search engine, we have basically one social network, uh, we have basically one marketplace, which is a problem for, for real people, a problem for people like you, trying to just make your way in the world, be a, be a journalist.
9:01 Speaker 05 And you want to really, you want that feeling that you appear with everybody else. You want to have control of your own destiny. We call it digital sovereignty. In the old days of the, early days of the web, anybody used to be able to make a website. That feeling of sovereignty as an individual being enabled and being a peer with all the other people on the web, that is what we are still fighting for and what we, and what we need to rebuild.
9:30 Speaker 04 This brings me to your book. It's called This is for Everyone. That seems like the heart of the book, that you should have more agency as you operate on the Internet, that you should be able to publish and consume as you wish. Explain how you came to that phrase and how you think about that phrase in the context of the Internet that we all experience today.
9:48 Speaker 05 That came from when I was given the chance to participate in the London Olympics. It was an amazing moment. I got an email from Danny Boyle saying, "Do you want to come to my office and let's talk about the Olympics opening ceremony?" I got to sit there and type a few words on an old Mac computer on the stage in the stadium. And when I hit return, then that phrase would go around the stadium in LED lights and then off over the Internet. So we decided this is for everyone as a way of really encapsulating what was most important about the web.
10:34 Speaker 04 When you think about This is for Everyone now, the argument I hear from so many of the platform CEOs who come onto the show say, "Yes, we are in control of a lot of things. Yes, we are in control of a lot of data. Yes, we feel like monopolies to a lot of people. But we've given so many more people tools to express themselves." TikTok might be a closed platform that doesn't really play all that well with the web, but we've given many, many millions of people more tools to express themselves and reach an audience. That's their argument, right? And I hear that argument virtually every day. I'm curious for your perspective on the opposite side of the argument, right? That that has actually closed down a version of the web, that has closed down a type of freedom, a type of digital sovereignty. How would you make the argument in response?
11:15 Speaker 05 I think there's two things about TikTok really. One is that it's not really part of the web. It's an app. But the other is that when you get onto TikTok, the algorithms on TikTok are addictive. And so when they build, you know, people, you know who you are, you're building the TikTok. Back end, you're building the UX. And you make it so that you optimize the AI so that people will be kept on the platform. So I'm not on TikTok. I get videos on YouTube. On YouTube, I find that I can stop scrolling through the... I don't end up scrolling through it forever. If I was on TikTok, I'd probably end up scrolling through it forever.
11:58 Speaker 05 When you have such great power, as you're a dominant player like TikTok, then you have a lot of responsibility. You have a responsibility to all the people on it that you respect them.
12:11 Speaker 04 So at the beginning of the web, you made a lot of people with a lot of power agree to participate in some standards, right? You made them agree to participate in browser standards. There was a ferocious competition in browsers at that time. It seems like we're about to enter a period of ferocious competition in browsers again, which I want to come to. But at that time, at the beginning of the web, there was a lot of competition in browsers. Microsoft was brought to heel in an antitrust case because there was such ferocious competition in browsers. How did you go about convincing all of those companies and all of those people to adopt your standards and say, "We actually have to be good stewards of the collective"? Because that doesn't seem like a thing that could maybe happen today. But you were able to do it at the outset of the web. How'd you do it?
12:53 Speaker 05 By persuading them that one web was going to be really good. That if you have just one web, it would take off exponentially. If we had many little webs, they would each one die. So I think people realized that. They managed to persuade their governance within their platforms, their managers, their boards, to make this one web. And they knew that if they fought over incompatible versions of HTML, then the web would not take off like it would if they made one web. If they made it one web, then one web would take off, would become huge. And then the part of that web would be itself huge.
13:41 Speaker 04 Could you make that argument today? And what technology would you make it about?
13:44 Speaker 05 I think a lot of people would wonder about whether you could make it with, can you make it with AI? Well, there is no WTC for AI, which is bringing everybody together in one room. Some people have suggested there should be something like a sort of CERN for AI, some big high energy physics lab in, in some big international lab which develops AI so that you can really optimize both the development of AI, but also the prevention of the thing running away, that you can build containers around it, for example.
14:22 Speaker 04 Could that be done? I mean, I'm just looking at the companies in the AI space. OpenAI seems unconstrained by any outside forces. Anthropic, I think, is a little more constrained. They're very enterprise focused, but they're also pushing as hard. You can just go down the list, right? All the big AI companies, they don't seem constrained or willing to accept constraint. The personality is driving the development of AI, almost religiously idealistic in nature. Could you, could you get them in a room and say you actually have to behave yourselves? And this will be bigger if we work together or constrain the capabilities?
14:55 Speaker 05 I think it's really, yeah, no, I think it's really hard. I don't see it happening.
15:01 Speaker 04 One of the characters in AI now that people are obviously aware of is Marc Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz. He is one of the world's richest people. He's driving a lot of AI development. He's investing in a lot. He was there at the beginning of the web. He obviously created Mosaic, the browser, and then Netscape. There was a profile view in The New Yorker recently, and you said in that that you felt Andreessen had hijacked the internet, your creation, to do something it wasn't intended to do, to commercialize it. Do you still see that dynamic playing out? How do you feel about Andreessen's work today?
15:29 Speaker 05 No, I don't think they hijacked. They did try to originally with Mosaic, they tried to, they tried to absolutely brand it as Mosaic. You will find it on Mosaic, not you'll find it on the web. But they lost that battle. The moment Microsoft came along, and there was a battle between Microsoft and Netscape, they lost the battle to brand it as Mosaic. So I've never been against commercialization of the web. So advertising has been a really important part of it. Subscription models, lots of different business models, I think, has always been important for the web.
16:02 Speaker 04 The reason I saw out Andreessen specifically is he's obviously a character now in a big way, he was a character at the beginning. He might understand that making one network, one AI network, as opposed, just as we made one web, would create exponential growth across the ecosystem. But I don't see him making that argument. What do you think would convince some of these players, even the players who've had the history of how big the web got, to make that argument? What would tip them over into actually collaboration makes the market picker?
16:31 Speaker 05 I think there are people in there, there are people like Dennis Hassabis, who has called for, so that some of those people, if you get, if you have a government-funded or philanthropically-funded nonprofit, and you invited to it all of those people who've expressed a concern, then you could maybe get, put them together and build something like a CERN for AI. But I think it's going to be a very tough job trying to get the, get the, most of the players out there to slow down for a second.
17:02 Speaker 04 Dennis Hassabis at Google, he has been on the show before, he is very thoughtful. I have heard him say out loud that he thinks the future of the web is agents going out on the web and doing things for you, and maybe the browser doesn't have a visual component anymore. He said that at Google I O, just this past year. I asked Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, about that comment, and he said, well, maybe Dennis was thinking too far ahead. I see that version of the web, where agentic browsers are going off and using web services for you, they're browsing the web for you, they're summarizing information, and maybe even using the applications for you, and the web itself changes because people are no longer using it, right? Automated systems are using it. That has kicked off another browser war.
17:46 Speaker 04 Just in the past week, I think, three AI browsers were released. OpenAI has Atlas, Google announced some of these features in Chrome, there's one from Opera, and so on. Do you see that new browser war as a source of innovation and excitement, as somebody who created the first set of browsers?
18:01 Speaker 05 And using AI as your first protocol is exciting. Yes, I do worry about the, the infrastructure of the web when it comes to the stack or all the... Flow of data which is being produced by people who make their money from advertising. If nobody's actually following through the links, if people are not using search engines, they're not actually using their websites, then we lose that flow of ad revenue. So that whole model crumbles. So I do worry about that.
18:38 Speaker 05 We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
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20:38 Speaker 04 We're back with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world web. Before the break, I was asking Tim about the new front in the browser wars and whether he sees AI browsers as an exciting new phase for the web. Now, I wanted to ask what attention I see at the heart of all this, between the power of the web as an application platform and what effects AI might end up having on that power if it becomes the interface layer for the internet. If I was starting The Verge today, I would look at the monetization available to me on the web. I would look at Google and one of its many antitrust cases saying that open web advertising is already in rapid decline. And I would look at the monetization available to me on some closed platform like TikTok and say, well, that's better. So I put the information there.
21:19 Speaker 04 And so the split that I see is that the web as an information platform is in decline. It just feels like there's not new information on the web in the way that there's new ideas and new information on some of the closed platforms. But the web is an application platform, a place where you can deploy an application and get to millions of users outside the strictures of an app store, outside the strictures of whatever an operating system might let you do. That feels like it's at an all-time high, right? I mean, that's where all the action is. And that split is really interesting because AI reduces the value of the web as an application platform. It becomes the interface to lots and lots of applications, and maybe they end up without interfaces at all. And that also feels like it will change the web in huge ways.
22:04 Speaker 04 Do you see that split? And how do you think AI factors into the web as an application platform?
22:09 Speaker 05 Yes, I do that split. And as an application platform, I'm concerned that if AI does not feed the search engine, it does not feed the blogs, the podcasts, the... To the extent that AI reads everything on the web and then helps you live your life by using that. One of the things I talk about in the book is that you need an AI that works for you. If it's only running off the external data out there, the AI won't be able to... Do a good job helping you in your life if it doesn't have access to your personal data. So at Interrupt, we've built, my company, we've built a version of AI, of a thing called Charlie,
22:54 Speaker 05 where it does have access to all your personal data in your data wallet. So an AI which does that is much more powerful. And I think that without that ability to access on your behalf, without promising to work on your best interests, you know, like your doctor or your lawyer, then doctors and lawyers take oaths and are culturally bound to support the best interests of the client, not of the person who pays them. I feel that AIs which work for you are going to be a really important part of the scene.
23:34 Speaker 04 How do you think that plays out with the applications on the web, though? If I have an AI that's working for me and maybe it's, you know, my personal data is in a wallet, using some of the protocols you've developed at Interrupt, sure, I get it. The AI has to go out onto the web. And then if I want to order a sandwich, it has to go to DoorDash. I call this the DoorDash problem. And then I, the customer, never talk to DoorDash, right? DoorDash has been disintermediated by an AI agent. And maybe DoorDash doesn't make enough money. And now we just have a bunch of commodity sandwich providers, and they race to the bottom and go out of business. How do you see that playing out? Like, where do you find the balance here? I've talked to a lot of these service provider companies over the past year, saying, how do you solve this problem?
24:17 Speaker 04 And all of them, two or one, I think, say, well, we're more valuable than the next one. So of course we won't get commodified, which is basically what everyone always says, right? Like, that's basically the answer, and then it doesn't play out that way. How would you build that business?
24:31 Speaker 05 Yes, the model is that. At the moment, DoorDash has got all that information about all the things you've ordered on DoorDash. But DoorDash only knows the things that you've ordered on DoorDash. Supposedly, your AI, as it did that, it made a note of everything that it ordered from DoorDash, but it had a note of all things it ordered from DoorDash one, but also from DoorDash two, from DoorDash three and so on, or DoorDash's competitors. So then, when you have a world where, in fact, the AI is doing this work for you, it will be able to understand more about what it can recommend that you should buy, what you should eat, if it's got information in your data wallet from the various DoorDashes.
25:13 Speaker 05 So it may be more inclined to collaborate with something with a version of DoorDash which synchronizes with your data wallet. Because sharing that information with the AI becomes so valuable, then there's incentive in the system. There's more value for the user if that data is available to the AI. And so if there's more value to the user, then generally the markets find ways of arranging incentives.
25:42 Speaker 04 Describe the architecture of this data wallet to me. So I have a local store of data that my AI can access that doesn't go out onto the web or any other system, that my AI is accessing. And my AI is also running locally. Sketch out the system for me.
25:58 Speaker 05 So your AI buys something, then at some point it uses something like Visa, when it uses the payment platform, for example. It's been talking to Visa about the future of agentic commerce. And so there's various architects around that where the payment provider can track what's going on, what's being bought, and track the message data about what's being bought, and make that data available to the user, for example. There's a privacy component and a user empowerment component to an architecture in which companies like these work with your data wallets.
26:44 Speaker 04 So I was just putting that in comparison to some of the agentic browsers that I see today. The first wave of agentic browsers were all pretty cloud based, even Google's first attempts were, we're going to run Chrome in a data center for you and you have to give us all of your logins, like we're going to take all of your logins up to the cloud. This is pretty obviously a bad idea, but I think given the AI workload that this involved, they had to do it that way at first. Now we're down to OpenAI is going to ship Atlas, which is an AI powered browser. It's going to run on your Mac and just like Chrome on your Mac, all of your passwords and all your data will be on your Mac inside of the browser ecosystem, which is a little more secure, maybe it's still not as secure as people want with cookies and the like,
27:26 Speaker 04 but so goes, then the agent will take action somehow in the browser. And it's actually unclear to me where all the inference is happening such that the browser can use itself. There's some dynamic between obviously OpenAI's data centers and the browser itself. The next turn is bringing that all the way down, right? Making all of that happen locally. So you are totally in control of your data and totally in control of whatever the AI is seeing without it going to someone else's data center. Where do you think we are in that journey and where do you think the right place to end up is?
27:55 Speaker 05 The right place to end up is where you're totally in control of your data. As the power of local devices becomes greater and then the amount of stuff which gets stored locally, local first storage, a lot of the things which people are building out there on the web are local first, meaning that, yeah, they're designed to be able to work without the cloud, that they store data either in the web.
28:23 Speaker 05 Or they store data on your local device. So the good place to be is that the data is all stored on your local device. The info is happening on your device and you're in control.
28:35 Speaker 04 So if that was the right outcome, how come it hasn't happened in the previous versions of the web? That's the dynamic that I'm really curious about. I agree that the right outcome is that users should be in control of their data, that we should be able to make our own choices about what's happening with our data, that we should be able to see and control and restrict that data. And the way that has been expressed, maybe effective, maybe not, right? Cookie sheets in Europe, Apple constantly prompting people on the iPhone. But it doesn't seem like users are actually demanding this, right? You do the surveys and consumers say they care a lot about privacy and then they turn that off and they immediately open Instagram, right? And there's a real disconnect between what people say they want
29:18 Speaker 04 and what they actually look for in the market. And we haven't gotten into a place in sort of any of the versions of the web so far where the data is private and it is local because that's actually what the market demanded. Why do you think that is?
29:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, I don't think users demanded the cookie law. The cookie law should have allowed a lot of cookie treatment to be done without the pop up. But that law was done at the wrong point, really.
29:44 Speaker 05 Badly written law.
29:45 Speaker 04 But why do you think the market hasn't gotten to a place in, let's call it Web 2.0, where users are more in control of their own data? Because we said that in the Web 2.0 era as well, right? Users should be in control of their own data. We should be able to build a massive application ecosystem that connects everybody's data. That was really the heart of the early part of Web 2.0. Whatever it became is something different. But that was a big pushback then too, right? Users should have a lot of data. You should be able to use a lot of applications and service in an intermixed way. It didn't play out. Why do you think that didn't play out?
30:16 Speaker 05 Well, there are some spaces, you know, some parts of your lives where it hasn't played out. Like when you use Apple things, they use all things in the iCloud. Yes, standard. You stored Google things stored in your G Cloud. Microsoft stored in Microsoft Cloud. So each platform stores stuff. You are in control of that data. So one of the problems is end up, yeah, there's Apple's store. Things can't store stuff in the G Cloud. But for example, when you're using Microsoft software, there's a Dropbox integration. So if you have a Dropbox, you can use. From Microsoft point of view, obviously, it's not really worried about where it stores the data.
30:56 Speaker 05 So in that area, you can elect to have your Microsoft stuff stored in Dropbox instead of the Microsoft Cloud stack. So in that area, you are in control of your own data.
31:09 Speaker 04 I guess I'm wondering, you know, from my perspective as somebody who's reviewed a lot of consumer products. My view of it is some of these things exist. They're very idealistic. A company like Microsoft will announce a Dropbox storage integration. And then no one uses it because it's vastly less convenient or it's harder to use. Another example I'll give you is if you are dead set on having the tightest security possible, you can keep all of your Apple data. You can keep your password. You don't have to sync it to iCloud. And then Apple will tell you that the vast majority of people do this because they forget their passwords. They go to the Apple Store and they demand a password reset that the centralized authority has to do for them. Right? And there's a real tension between you should be in control
31:54 Speaker 04 and you should give up a lot of control because you're, you need the convenience of somebody else being in charge. And you can see this broadly in the IT space, right? Like users just want an IT administrator to do a lot of things for them. In the AI space where that control carries a lot of risk, right? Someone else will let an AI agent make decisions on your behalf across the web. That's very risky. Do you think that will be enough to push users to saying, actually, I want less convenience and more control?
32:22 Speaker 05 Pretty hard to tell what users are going to do. But yeah, people trust Apple with their passwords. They trust iCloud to sync them to a certain extent. If Apple, if that did that with open protocols, like if your Apple passwords sync, but iCloud was done using solid login and solid data protocols, then that would be open and interoperable. But people do, they don't have the interoperability between different platforms. But they do have the functionality. They do want the functionality of having somebody in the cloud. And I think you're in the solid ecosystem. There's, you're trusting somebody.
33:06 Speaker 05 You put a lot of stuff in your various data wallets and you trust the data provider to do the right thing with them. So people, to a certain extent, before and after. The difference isn't that you trust a big company to look after your data. You don't as much as it's that the data company that does it, does it in a way that's standard and interoperable.
33:30 Speaker 04 Can you do that through market forces alone? Or do you actually need a big set of regulations from the governments around the world?
33:36 Speaker 05 I can't see it happening with market forces. People have, your lower area has suggested that we should, that we should have regulations for interoperability. I think there's been some talk in Europe about interoperability through regulation.
33:53 Speaker 04 There's a big split across the Atlantic. Obviously, we see in Europe, there's more push towards regulation. There's more activity around regulating, especially American tech companies. I think we see that very clearly. In the United States lately, under Trump, very deregulatory, especially around AI. The idea that we shouldn't regulate AI for a decade has come up over and over again in this country. Do you think there'll be a meaningful split or that European regulation can actually hold some AI companies in check?
34:19 Speaker 05 Very hard to predict the future there. AI is changing so fast and what you end up regulating, you know, one moment you're regulating AI taking over people's jobs in one industry, next moment you're regulating different industry, next moment you're worrying about AGI and superintelligence. So because AI is changing so fast, I think it's really hard to tell which way things will go in that way. What do you think?
34:50 Speaker 04 I think the European governments are very interested in controlling what American tech companies do to their economies and they will pass some regulations, but I'm not sure that American tech companies will listen. And I think this is the new danger, that American tech companies are kind of barreling over various kinds of regulation. Actually, the example I would give to you is the semantic web, right? You spent years of your life working on a semantic web, a machine readable web. I think your rallying cry was, give us the raw data, right? Open the databases to browsers, let us build new applications on top of your databases, don't make custom front ends. And this was, you know, when I was young and I was reading your work on it, it was very exciting, right? The idea that we would make the world sort of machine readable and that would create
35:35 Speaker 04 a new class of applications and services and user experiences. As a young person in college, reading your work on that was inspiring. Maybe that happened in some ways and maybe it didn't happen in other ways. And now what I'm looking at is a bunch of companies with huge training data needs, doing it anyway, right? They can just horsepower through the front end of the website with an AI tool and take the data, whether or not it was made available, under whatever terms they want. That dynamic is, on the one hand, I'm curious, like, that feels like the vision of the semantic web achieved. Everything is now machine readable because the machines learn to read. And on the other hand, it feels extraordinarily extractive.
36:18 Speaker 04 Right, it feels unfair to so many people in a way that is just obvious to see. And I don't know that anyone will listen. I don't know that anyone will say, actually, that trade off was improper. Right, it made a lot of people feel bad, even though you got to build the tools you want. And I'm curious if you see, A, that dynamic, if you see, I'm curious if you see the vision of the semantic web achieved with generative AI in this way. And I'm curious if you see the unfairness of the trade that so many people perceive.
36:46 Speaker 05 I mean, there is, yeah, the semantic web has succeeded to the extent of there's the linked open data world of public databases of all kinds of things about proteins and geography and, you know, the OpenStreetMap and so on. So to a certain extent, the semantic web, I suppose, succeeded in two ways. That and because of schema.org. Schema.org is this project at Google that if you have a website and you want to be recognized by the search engine, then you put metadata about in semantic web data. You put machine generated data on your website, then the Google search engine will build a mental model of your band or your, whatever it is, your music, whatever it is you're
37:28 Speaker 05 selling, to those ways with the LinkedIn data group, you go to a public database, and that the semantic web has been a success. But then, yeah, we never built the things which would extract semantic data from non-semantic data. But now, yeah, now AI will do that. And so, yes, as you say, so now we've got another wave of the semantic web where AI is the tool. So you have a possibility where AIs use the semantic web, you know, communicate between each other. One interesting possibility is that they communicate with each other.
38:07 Speaker 05 There is a web of data which is generated by AIs and used by AIs and used by people and also mainly used by AIs. Because AIs find that having, once they've extracted the data, then the most efficient thing is to exchange that data in a semantic way. So, yeah, I think to a certain extent, because AI solves that problem of conversion of non-semantic data into semantic data. Yes, maybe we'll be in for an exciting time of some of the things, the interoperability that we were looking for from the semantic web being available.
38:58 Speaker 04 We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
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40:51 Speaker 04 We're back with worldwide web inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, discussing how his approach to growing the early web, powered by a vision of collective self-interest, all working together toward a shared goal, has disappeared in the AI era. What's happening instead is that the social contract of the web seems to be falling apart all around us. And I want to know what Tim thinks about that.
41:11 Speaker 04 So what's interesting about that is your campaign at the beginning of the semantic web era was one of persuasion, right? You were giving talks, you were writing articles, saying, "Open your databases to the web in a structured way so that computers can read them properly and we can have access to all this data and build wonderful things." And that campaign of persuasion is also a campaign of negotiation, right? Me, as the holder of the database, can say, "Okay, that sounds good. I understand the value that would be created if I do this. I understand the value that I might receive, and here's what I'm willing to give you." And that feels fair, right? Maybe it's good, or maybe it's bad. Maybe it will succeed, maybe it will fail. But the person who has the data has agency, right?
41:56 Speaker 04 And your campaign of persuasion was to convince them to make the decision to give up the data in this way. The AI companies are not in the business of persuasion. They are in the business of extraction. And it feels like a lot of norms in the internet were not ready for that, right? And by norms, I mean, there's not a system encoded by the W3C about what web browsers can access what websites. There's robots.txt, which is just a file that everyone has sort of handshake-agreed to abide by, that maybe the companies are abiding by or not. How would you build in a system that gives the owners of data control over the extraction from the AI companies? Could you do it today?
42:39 Speaker 05 Well, you could certainly design it. I mean, semantic web technology is a sort of allows you to write information about information and to write things like rules. So you could certainly, if you wanted, it would be certainly possible to design and build that system, whether you get anybody using it.
42:59 Speaker 04 So what's interesting about that, again, this dynamic between the open ecosystem and the centralized providers, it occurs at every part of this conversation. So no one is listening to robots.txt from what I can tell, right, which is just can you crawl my website? And maybe Google still listens to it, but actually, Google has another crawler that if you want to be in the search index, you have to allow Google to crawl your site for AI. They have some leverage that they're using. But you have a big centralized service provider in Cloudflare, which has a lot of caching for a lot of websites. And they're saying, we're just going to block the AI crawlers. Like, we have a lot of leverage in this ecosystem as well. We will block most of them. Their CEO has been very loud about this. And we're
43:42 Speaker 04 going to say, we have a new format called the content signals policy, and you got to pay. Like, we're creating leverage by just blocking AI crawlers at every scale. That is, on the one hand, it's great that someone has a lot of leverage to push back. On the other hand, it's a centralized provider on the web, saying, we will control how the web develops. We have the power and we're going to use it. That dynamic is, again, I think it's the tension that animates this conversation, if not the entire web. Is that appropriate? Do you think that's good? Is that how you want this to work?
44:15 Speaker 05 What do you think of that move?
44:17 Speaker 04 I'm not the person who invented the web, sir. Again, I see that tension. Most of my conversations on Decoder about the web and the future of the web land on this tension. There are some people with power and some people without. And the web is supposed to democratize power.
44:35 Speaker 05 Putting the robot, the power of implementing robot text in the hands of Cloudflare, that's in a way in a strange twist.
44:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's unforeseen. And I'm wondering, as somebody who's seen the development of this from the literal beginning, if you anticipated that twist, and if you think Cloudflare having this power over the web is appropriate?
44:58 Speaker 05 Matthew Price said himself, he said in a blog before that he shouldn't be making, he said about the question of blocking hate speech, he said it shouldn't be for me as CEO of Cloudflare, he blogged that. And I think he may say the same thing that it should really, he would prefer it if this thing was done by government or by a consortium. I'm guessing, trying to channel him, I imagine that he probably would, doesn't feel as appropriate, but he's found that it's only...
45:33 Speaker 04 Matthew has been on the show before, we'll have him again. I know what he would say. And I think the economic interest for Cloudflare to do this is also very much aligned, right? Cloudflare on behalf of its customers will tell a bunch of AI companies to go away unless you pay. And Cloudflare and its customers have a deeply aligned economic interest. In many ways, the customers are paying Cloudflare for that service specifically. I'm wondering about you as the architect of the web. Do you think having one centralized provider that can block or deny access to a number of web browsers on economic terms is the right outcome?
46:09 Speaker 05 No, of course, I don't feel that a centralized provider is any level, content distribution networks or any level of the web, obviously. A centralized monopoly is not good for the web.
46:22 Speaker 04 So could you build that functionality into the architecture of the web itself to say, the different websites, different database owners can say, not unless you pay me. And this is in the standard. And then that will be actually honored by everybody in the ecosystem.
46:37 Speaker 05 You could write the protocols. Well, in fact, micropayments is something which we've had micropayment projects in WTC every now and again over decades. The big project at MIT, for example, for micropayments and so on. So suddenly, payment required error code in HTTP. So the idea that people would pay for code information on the web. But of course, whether you're an AI... Crawler or whether your individual person, the payments, it's the way you want to pay things is going to be very different.
47:17 Speaker 04 The other thing I'm really interested about, just as we look at the world of browsers of being introduced, literally just in the past two weeks, there are more new browsers and more big companies interested in browsers in the past two weeks than maybe the past five years. Again, OpenAI has Atlas, Proplexity has Comet, Google is rolling out the features in Chrome, Microsoft is rolling out the features in Edge, on and on down the line. Atlassian, it's just a big software company, just bought the browser company, they have a browser called Dia that does some of these things. All of them are built on the same kind of core browser engine technology, right, where these are a bunch of Chromium browsers at the end of the day. Do you think there needs to be innovation at that part of the stack? That the browser engine itself needs to be where the competition happens?
48:01 Speaker 04 Or is it just the user experience where the competition needs to happen?
48:05 Speaker 05 In general, both. It'd be nice if there were more than one browser engine around. In fact, there's Chromium, which is a monopoly. It'd be nice if other browser engines were competing, but a browser engine is a big thing to build. So having one way of doing it, sometimes software stacks, you have one definitive sort of standard version becomes the standard, because you can't afford to have more than one implementation with browser stack. But it's been nice to have more than one.
48:37 Speaker 04 There is one other one of note. It's WebKit, which is what Apple uses in Safari on the iPhone. It is dominant in its way. Building for WebKit is a thing that every mobile developer has to think about all the time, because it is dominant on the iPhone. Apple doesn't allow other browser engines on the iPhone. It certainly doesn't allow Chromium. Now, thanks to some EU regulation, it might have to, depending on how some antitrust litigation in the United States goes, it might have to. But up until now, Apple has not allowed anything but WebKit on the iPhone. Even Chrome on the iPhone has a skin over the top of the core browser engine, WebKit. Do you think that Apple being made to allow Chromium to run on the iPhone, for example, will actually lead to new browser innovation?
49:19 Speaker 05 I can't help it to have a competition to allow Chrome to run Chromium to run on iPhones. Sounds like a good move.
49:29 Speaker 04 What do you think that would achieve?
49:31 Speaker 05 When you have a competition between different sections of the layer, it tends to improve innovation. You get more bright ideas out there.
49:41 Speaker 04 One of the arguments I've heard for why Apple will not allow other browser engines is that they can artificially restrict WebKit. So it's not as good of a competitor to the native apps on the iPhone as web apps on the desktop are to native apps on the Mac or Windows or whatever. If you had true web apps being able to run in Chromium on the iPhone, if you had that browser competition, there was a much more capable browser, do you think that would displace how the native apps work? This is where we began the conversation, right? Is this push to apps because they're more capable on the iPhone? But if you had a browser that was as capable as a desktop browser on the iPhone, do you think that would change the dynamic?
50:15 Speaker 05 So I'd have to do, I think we've been chasing to a bunch of tests to find out to what extent this is true. Yes, I've heard rumors that, but I can't substantiate them, that Apple is deliberately slowing down WebKit on the phone in order so that it's not to compete with Apple native apps.
50:35 Speaker 04 By the way, just for the record, Apple would tell you as loudly as they can that WebKit on the phone is as good as any other browser. And I think most users would tell you that it is not. And that gap is where I think the theories about Apple's development priorities come from. But I'm just asking more hypothetically. We've discussed the web as an application at an all time high, right? On desktop, if you have a Mac or a Windows PC or Linux, you are using web apps. Like mostly what you're using is applications expressed through web technology, even if they appear to be native, right? Electron and other wrappers are just presenting web apps to you in ways that feel native. That is not true on mobile. It just, it really is not. Even for Google's efforts on Android, right?
51:18 Speaker 04 Progressive web apps on Android have not taken the world by storm. Do you think a more powerful browser on the iPhone would ever change that dynamic? Or do you think people just want apps on phones?
51:26 Speaker 05 I think a more powerful browser on the iPhone would change that dynamic.
51:34 Speaker 04 That to me feels like for all of the things we've talked about, the future of the web has to happen on mobile. Right? I mean, that is where the people are. That is the device that everyone carries around every day. And right now, Apple's decisions about what the web cannot do on mobile are actually the gatekeeper, right? In real ways for most people's experience of the web. And so if you introduce some competition, can you break that? Or do you need to just switch to Android? Where Google wants you to use the web?
52:05 Speaker 05 Exactly, yeah.
52:07 Speaker 04 Do you have an iPhone or an Android phone?
52:09 Speaker 05 I have an iPhone.
52:10 Speaker 04 Yeah. I think this is the... And when you use the web on the iPhone, does it feel like the thing that you set out to build so many years ago?
52:20 Speaker 05 Pretty much. I suppose if I'm gonna read anything serious, I tend to read it on a laptop.
52:28 Speaker 04 So we've laid out, I think, the state of the web today. You've got a company called Inrupt. You are building digital wallets. Explain to folks what Inrupt is and how those products might actually solve these problems.
52:39 Speaker 05 Inrupt is a company. I started to... It's I N for innovation, rupt for disruption. And Inrupt.com was available as a...
52:49 Speaker 04 That's very good.
52:50 Speaker 05 ...main name a few years ago. Inrupt is designed to do whatever it takes to bring the solid vision to the ecosystem. And what Inrupt is in fact done is to produce the enterprise-grade, secure, scalable version of a data wallet server. So of a solid protocol-compatible server. The... Sorry, it has a product called ESS, the Enterprise Solid Server, which is not open source. It's engineered to be scalable and secure. And so Inrupt has worked with a bunch of people. We've worked, for example, with BBC.
53:35 Speaker 05 We worked on a project to give people who logged on to the BBC, they would get themselves a little data wallet on the side in which they could have a watch party. And the watch party demo worked with... Which it is with real people. Or we have worked using a data wallet. The Flanders government is the way the Flanders government interfaces with citizens is through these solid compatible data wallets. The Flanders, which is that speaking part of Belgium, in Raptor, we've got an interesting
54:15 Speaker 05 connection with Visa at the moment because Visa want to be, they want to make sure they do the right thing in terms of personal data when it comes to agentic commerce. There's a recent announcement recently by a few weeks ago by Visa about that.
54:36 Speaker 04 So if you're listening to Decoder and you want to go try Inrupt or a solid-based wallet, can you do it or is this all happening at one level up?
54:43 Speaker 05 If you go to, yeah, so you can go to project.org. The operating system is developer ready, but not user ready, ready for any. Everybody just get on and get that data wallet. Yes, but it'll be in a year or so.
55:00 Speaker 04 Well, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, this has been an amazing conversation and thank you so much for joining Decoder. I feel like in a year or two, we'll have you back and we'll see where the web is at and what you think about them because it feels like it's in a lot of flux right now.
55:11 Speaker 05 It is, isn't it?
55:13 Speaker 04 Yeah. And in a way, it feels exciting because it has been in stasis for some time, but it also feels more uncertain and I'm curious what happens in a year. So we will have to have you back.
55:24 Speaker 05 Let's do that.
55:25 Speaker 04 Yeah. Thank you so much for joining Decoder.
55:27 Speaker 05 Okay.
55:31 Speaker 04 I'd like to thank Sir Tim Berners-Lee for taking the time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else you'd like us to cover, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected] . We really do read all the emails. Or hit me up directly on Blue Sky or Threads. We're also on YouTube now. You can watch full episodes at at DecoderPod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're at DecoderPod as well and they're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get a podcast. Decoder is production The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox, Nick Statt, and edited by Ursula Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
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