Sir Tim Berners-Lee Doesn’t Think AI Will Destroy the Web  ## Metadata - Author: [[Decoder with Nilay Patel]] - Full Title: Sir Tim Berners-Lee Doesn’t Think AI Will Destroy the Web - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/d5defc1b-e5a0-407b-b44d-492825589352 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Centralization Erodes Digital Sovereignty** - Dominant platforms concentrate control by persuading users to use apps for better tracking and monetization. - Sir Tim Berners-Lee calls this loss of individual digital sovereignty a core problem for the web. Transcript: Nilay Patel And how do you feel about that broadly? Because that's the shift that I think I feel the most. Sir Tim Berners-Lee 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, you know, New York Times is constantly saying, please download the app. Or BBC says, please use the app. They always try to persuade you to use the app because then they have more control. They can track you better. But also, 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 the web as it should be. You can send me a link to a podcast, or I can search for it, and I can put it in my copy, and I can keep track of all the hundreds of podcasts I'm interested in. And it's a bit like keeping some bookmarks on the original browser. And so 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 so. All that tension is huge right now for the web. Yes. Nilay Patel There's a reason I want to start there, because I think understanding how you feel about it will inform so much of the questions I have for you. That tension between YouTube is on the web, but all the videos on YouTube are not available in other players. Right. 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 podcasts, and all the podcast players use it for discovery. And so that tension between where does the 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 end up exerting more and more dominance over the ecosystem. And maybe that has been inexorable over the past few years, but I'm curious how you see it. Sir Tim Berners-Lee Well, when you have a market and a network, then you end up with monopolies. That's the way markets work. So bit by bit we've seen, 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 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. We have basically one marketplace, which is a problem for real people, a problem for people like you who are trying to just make your way in the world, be a journalist. And you want that feeling that you appear with everybody else. You want to have control of your own destiny. We call it digital sovereignty. ([Time 0:06:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ab7aa0d1-4454-4f94-84d6-c9d914f64cbc)) - **The Olympic Moment That Framed The Web** - Tim described typing "this is for everyone" onstage during the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. - That phrase captured his lifelong vision of the web as an inclusive public resource. Transcript: Sir Tim Berners-Lee And when I hit return, then that phrase would go around the stadium and LED lights, and then off over the internet. So we decided that this is for everyone. It was a way of really encapsulating what was most important about the web. ([Time 0:10:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/44e6c7da-d574-4aa5-9165-c8c9cd1b4245)) - **One Web Enabled Exponential Growth** - Tim convinced companies to build one interoperable web because a single web would grow exponentially. - He warns fragmented, incompatible webs would have stalled global adoption and innovation. Transcript: Sir Tim Berners-Lee 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. ([Time 0:13:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f0085a50-98bc-4047-bb7f-fe999de2ec04)) - **AI Lacks A Unifying Governance Body** - There's no global coordinating body for AI like the W3C or CERN to unify standards and safety. - Tim doubts major AI players will willingly accept constraints without new cooperative institutions. Transcript: Sir Tim Berners-Lee 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 WVC 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 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. Nilay Patel 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 us 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 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? Sir Tim Berners-Lee I think it's really, yeah. No, I think it's really hard. I don't see it happening. ([Time 0:14:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/20521160-6aa0-4c6f-a296-3ca12b6c4076)) - **Agents Threaten Web's Economic Flow** - Agentic, AI-first browsing excites innovation but threatens the web's ad-driven economic flow. - Tim worries summaries that bypass site visits could collapse the existing monetization model. Transcript: Sir Tim Berners-Lee I think using AI as your first protocol is exciting. Yes, I do worry about the infrastructure of the web when it comes to the stack of all the flow of data which is 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. ([Time 0:18:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/773f89b3-d5d6-46a6-8a9c-0ff255abff54)) - **Give AIs Access To Personal Data Wallets** - Build AIs that work for users by giving them access to personal data in private wallets. - Tim advocates personal-data wallets so assistants can act in users' best interests rather than external services'. Transcript: Sir Tim Berners-Lee Split. And as an application platform, I'm concerned that if the AI does not feed the search engine, it does not feed the the podcasts. 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 own personal data. So it interrupts. We've built, by company, we've built a version of AI, a thing called Charlie, where it does have access to all your personal data in your data wallet. So an AI which does that is much more powerful. Think that without that ability to act as in 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 scenery. ([Time 0:25:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5b4c5958-659a-419f-aac9-59650bd473e4)) - **Data Wallets Rebalance Agentic Commerce** - A personal AI that aggregates your purchases across services gives it more value and prevents disintermediation. - Shared data wallets create incentives for services to integrate rather than be bypassed by agents. Transcript: Sir Tim Berners-Lee Yes, the model is that at the moment, DoorDash has got all that information about all the things that 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 you've ordered from DoorDash, but it had a note of all the things that you've ordered from DoorDash 1, but also from DoorDash 2, from DoorDash 3, and so on, or DoorDash's competitors. So then when you have a world where, in fact, the AI which 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 door dashes so it may be more inclined to collaborate with something with a version of door dash which synchronizes with Your data wallet Because sharing that information with the AI becomes more valuable, then there's an 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. ([Time 0:27:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9a2c16fe-aaca-49f1-b32f-15cd2109509d)) - **Prioritize Local-First Storage And Compute** - Strive for local-first storage and processing so users retain control of their data and AI interactions. - Tim recommends running data and computation on users' devices as local compute becomes more capable. Transcript: Sir Tim Berners-Lee 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. They store data either in the web 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 difference is happening on your device and you're in control. ([Time 0:30:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a04a51d6-279f-4f8c-a083-c246e17ca4d0)) - **AI Realizes The Semantic Web's Promise** - The semantic web saw wins like linked open data and schema.org but failed to automate extraction from unstructured content. - Now generative AI can convert non-semantic data into machine-readable formats, delivering the semantic web's promise differently. Transcript: Sir Tim Berners-Lee 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 in semantic web data. You put machine-readed data in your website. Then the Google search engine will build a mental model of your band or your music, whatever it is you're selling. So those ways with the LinkedIn data group, we go to a public database, and that the semantic web has been a success. But then 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. ([Time 0:40:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f1c03e51-3b89-4f7f-bb5c-e1fd63cac4f3)) - **Protocols Could Protect Data, If Adopted** - Web protocols can encode rules and payments to control automated extraction, but adoption is political and economic. - Tim notes micropayment ideas and protocol-level controls exist, yet incentives and standards must align to implement them. Transcript: Sir Tim Berners-Lee Well, you could certainly design it. I mean, and cinematic web technology is a sort of, you know, allows you to write information about information and to write things like rules. So you could certainly, if you wanted, you know, it would be certainly possible to design and build that system, whether you'd get anybody using it. Nilay Patel So it'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, 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 writer 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. We have a lot of leverage in this ecosystem as well. We will block most of them. The CEO has been very loud about this. And we're going to say, we have a new format called the content signals policy, and you got to pay. 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 the system to work? What do you think of that move? 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. Sir Tim Berners-Lee Putting the robot power of implementing robot text in the hands of Cloudflare, that's in a way in a strange twist. Nilay Patel 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? Sir Tim Berners-Lee Matthew Price would say it 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 he 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 that it's appropriate, but he's found that it's only- Well, no, hold on. Nilay Patel 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. 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? Sir Tim Berners-Lee No, of course, I don't feel a centralized provider at any level. Quantum distribution networks or any level of the web, obviously. A centralized monopoly is not good for the web. Nilay Patel 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 would be actually honored by everybody in the ecosystem. Sir Tim Berners-Lee You could write the protocols. Well, in fact, micropayments is something which we've had micropayment projects in WCC every now and again over decades. There have been projects 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 information on the web. ([Time 0:47:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ff10ac88-345c-421e-bde2-986c991c7ed8)) - **Browser Engine Monopoly Hinders Innovation** - Chromium's dominance makes a single engine efficient but stifles competition in browser engines. - Tim says multiple engines would spur innovation, yet building engines is costly so consolidation persists. Transcript: Sir Tim Berners-Lee In general, both. It would be nice if there were more than one browser engine around. In fact, there's Chromium, which is a monopoly. It would 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 would be nice to have more than one. Nilay Patel There's 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? Sir Tim Berners-Lee I can't help it to have a competition to allow Chromium to run on iPhone sounds like a good move. What do you think that would achieve? When you have a competition between different sections of the layer, it tends to improve innovation. ([Time 0:52:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/91382d63-7cfd-4501-8943-c536037d2c5d)) - **Mobile Browsers Could Reclaim App Territory** - A more capable mobile browser could shift users away from native apps by enabling richer web apps on phones. - Tim believes stronger mobile browsers would change app dynamics, especially if Apple allows competing engines. Transcript: Sir Tim Berners-Lee I think a more powerful browser on the iPhone would change that dynamic. Nilay Patel 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? Sir Tim Berners-Lee Exactly, yeah. ([Time 0:55:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/866c2e93-5056-43c8-89e9-9e02823ec2ce)) - **Inrupt's Real-World Data Wallet Pilots** - Inrupt builds enterprise-grade Solid servers and worked with BBC and Flanders on data wallet pilots. - Tim described real deployments that showcase Solid-compatible data wallets with government and media partners. Transcript: Sir Tim Berners-Lee Is a company I started to, it's IN for innovation, Inrupt for disruption, and Inrupt.com was available as the 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 has in fact done is to produce the enterprise-grade, secure, scalable version of a data wallet server. So of a solid protocol compatible server. So, 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, I've worked with a bunch of people who we've worked, for example, with BBC. 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 real people or worked using a data wallet. The Flanders government, the way the Flanders government interfaces with citizens is through these solid compatible data wallets. ([Time 0:57:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5be0b2b8-aaac-4e76-bfa7-57590ba49885))