The Freename Forum

The non-profit World Wide Web Foundation is being liquidated after around 15 years. This was announced by its founders Tim Berners-Lee and Rosemary Leith. Instead, work on the ‘Solid Protocol’ is to be intensified.

Founded on 17 November 2009 in Washington (DC), the World Wide Web Foundation, also known as the Web Foundation, was committed to promoting the web as a public good and fundamental right. Its goal was a world in which everyone has the same rights and opportunities online. The ‘Contract for the Web’ was published as a set of principles that were incorporated into a contract published on 25 November 2019; signatories included companies such as Google, Facebook and Cloudflare, as well as a number of civil society organisations. However, the Web Foundation should not be confused with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); although the W3C was also founded by Berners-Lee, it has a fundamentally different function as a body for standardising technologies on the World Wide Web. It develops technical specifications and guidelines such as HTML, XML or CSS and has thus produced numerous de facto standards. The same applies to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which deals with the further technical development of the Internet. In contrast, the Web Foundation has pursued a number of research projects, but has not set any technical standards.

And this will not happen in the future either. In a public letter dated 27 September 2024, Berners-Lee and Leith announced under the heading ‘An Update on the Future of the Web Foundation’ that the decision had been made to wind up the foundation. They explained that in 2009, just over 20 per cent of the world's population had access to the internet; this had changed dramatically and the figure was now just under 70 per cent. There are now many excellent non-governmental organisations that defend the principles of the Web Foundation and the rights of users on the Internet. In addition, the threats have changed; the dominant business model of social media has led to a commercialisation of user data and a concentration of power that contradicts Berners-Lee's vision. They therefore asked themselves where they could make the greatest impact in the future and came to the conclusion that this lay in giving power and control over their data back to the individual. To best achieve this, Berners-Lee will focus his activities on the ‘Solid Protocol’ and other decentralised systems. ‘The board of the Web Foundation has therefore made the decision to wind down the Web Foundation, closing our virtual doors at the end of September and enabling Tim to focus on his vision for Solid,’ reads the letter.

According to its own statements, the ‘Solid Protocol’ sees itself as a ‘medium for the secure, decentralised exchange of public and private data’. Data is stored in so-called ‘pods’ (personal online data stores) and functions like personal web servers. Ideally, users can decide for themselves where their personal information is stored. However, Berners-Lee does not think much of Web3 because it is too slow and too expensive. ‘Ignore the Web3 stuff’, he advised the audience at the Web Summit in Lisbon in 2022.

You can find the letter from Tim Berners-Lee and Rosemary Leith at:
https://webfoundation.org/docs/2024/09/ ... r_WWWF.pdf

Further information on the ‘Solid Protocol’ can be found at:
https://solidproject.org/