Inventor of the world wide web wants us to reclaim our data from tech giants

Due to (i) a laissez faire public attitude, esp. in the US, that "if this was a serious problem, someone would have done something about it", (ii) a pervasive misunderstanding of how important information privacy is to democracy and society and (iii) regulatory capture by big tech it, will be a long time before there is a regulatory solution (esp. in the US). As for historical parallels, they're not promising. It was decades after the excesses by the "robber barons" and their unfettered capitalism in the late 1800s before the US government built institutions and laws to push back by creating consumer protection (child labor laws, the food and drug administration, the social security administration, etc.) As an alternative to waiting for government, some of us are exploring a combination of contract law and a personal "identity agent" (an app running on your devices that includes a personal datastore). This agent makes your data available to a service provider's apps and sites under "human information license" that states a set of reasonable, non-exploitative terms. This approach requires voluntary participation on the part of the service provider. There may be sufficient incentives for some kinds of providers to participate, but admittedly it's an uphill climb. WRT the contract notion, what I envision is similar to JLINC's information sharing contract (https://sisa.jlinc.org/v1/3b39160c2b9ae7b2ef81c3311c7924f1c4...)

Someone as visionary as TBL surely saw the problems with centralization very early on, even before the WWW started gaining traction.

His original goals for the HyperText project[1] involved two phases. The first to build web browsers, and the second to make it easy for users to publish content. This second phase was never completed, AFAIK.

We've had many attempts over the years to address this, but by the time tech silos and web giants were getting established, and advertising starting to corrupt the user experience—mid to late 90s—it was already too late. Millions of people were getting online, and the understanding that the web works by services being provided, often for "free", by large tech companies, was being ingrained in popular culture.

Reversing that notion once the web had matured, and people had become used to giving away their data and personal information to companies, became more difficult as time went on.

As much as privacy conscious nerds will applaud this effort to take the power back to users, I think it's too little, too late, for it to gain any real mainstream adoption. It would have to be done with a reboot of the current web, or a separate network altogether; not this web3 nonsense. The likelihood of either succeeding is very low.

I don't want to sound pessimistic, and genuinely hope I'm wrong about this, for the good of all of us, but I am a bit _miffed_, to put it lightly, that none of these tech visionaries saw these problems early on and tried to fix them when it was possible, and that we ended up with a corrupted version of what the web was supposed to be.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html