Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web

26:50Like, 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 of 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, but so it goes. then the agent will take action somehow in the browser.

27:22And 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? 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.

28:11that 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 interest is happening on your device and you're in control. 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.

28:46And 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 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.

29:21Why do you think that is? Yeah, I don't think users demanded the cookie law. 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. It was badly written law. 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.

29:57Whatever it became is something different. But that was a big push back 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? Well, there's some spaces, some parts of your lives where it hasn't played out. Like when you use Apple Things, you store things in the iCloud. You're not standard. You store Google Things stored in your G Cloud. Microsoft's storage in Microsoft Cloud. So each platform stores stuff. you are in control of that data so one of the problems is Apple 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 a Microsoft point of view obviously it's not really worried about where it stores the data 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.

31:01I guess I'm wondering, 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.

31:37They 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 and you should give up a lot of control because 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?

32:14It's really 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 did that with open protocols, like if your Apple password sync with iCloud was done using solid login and solid data protocols, then that would be open and interoperable. But people 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 a solid ecosystem. You're trusting somebody. You put a lot of stuff in your various data wallets, and you trust the data wallet provider to do the right thing with them.

33:06So people, to a certain extent, before and after. The difference isn't that you trust a big company to look after your data. or 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. Can you do that through market forces alone, or do you actually need a big set of regulations from the governments around the world? I can't see it happening with market forces. People have, you'll know Harari has suggested that we should have regulations for interoperability. I think there's been some talk in Europe about interoperability through regulation.

33:45There'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. And I'd say it's 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? 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.

34:25Next moment you're regulating a different industry. Next moment you're worrying about AGI and superintelligence. So, because it's changing so fast, I think it's really hard to tell which way things will go in that way. What do you think? 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.

35:04You 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. Open the databases to browsers. Let us build new applications on top of your databases. Don't make custom front ends. And this was when I was young and I was reading your work on it. It was very exciting, the idea that we would make the world sort of machine-readable, and that would create 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.

35:37And now what I'm looking at is a bunch of companies with huge training data needs doing it anyway. 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. Now, on the other hand, it feels extraordinarily extractive, 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.

36:17I don't know that anyone will say, actually, that tradeoff 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. 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. I mean, yeah, the semantic web has succeeded to the extent that there's a linked open data world of public databases of all kinds of things about proteins and geography and the open street map and so on. So to a certain extent, the semantic web will succeed in two ways.

36:57That 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-readable data on your website. Then the Google search engine will build a mental model of your band or your music, whatever it is you're selling. to those ways with the linked data group, 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.

37:50So you have a possibility where AIs use the semantic web, communicate between each other. So one interesting possibility is that they communicate with each other. 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 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.

38:49We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.

38:57We'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 wanted to know what Tim thinks about that. So what's interesting about that is your campaign at the beginning of the semantic web era was one of persuasion. 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.

39:36And 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? 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.

40:13They are in the business of extraction. And it feels like a lot of norms on the internet were not ready for that. 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? Well, you could certainly design it. I mean, automatic web technology allows you to write information about information and to write things like rules.

40:56so that you could certainly, if you wanted, it would be certainly technically possible to design and build that system, whether you'd get anybody using it. 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, which is just, can you crawl on 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.

41:34But 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've 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.

42:10We have the power and we're going to use it. That dynamic is, again, I think it's the tension that animates this conversation about 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. Putting the robot power of implementing robot text in the hands of Cloudflare, that's in a way in a strange twist.

42:53Yeah, 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. Matthew Price would say 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 And I imagine that he probably doesn't feel that it's appropriate, but he's found that it's only...

43:39Hold on. Matthew's 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?

44:15No, of course. I don't feel a centralized provider at any level. Content distribution networks or any level of the web, obviously. A centralized monopoly is not good for the web. 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. 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. with big projects at MIT, for example, for micropayments and so on.

45:01So suddenly payment required error code in HTTP. So the idea that people would pay for information on the web. But of course, whether you're an AI crawler or whether you're an individual person, the payments, it's the way you want to pay things that's going to be very different. The other thing I'm really interested about, just as we look at the world of browsers 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.

45:44Microsoft is rolling out the features in Edge. On and on down the line. Atlassian, which is 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? Or is it just the user experience where the competition needs to happen? In general, both. It would be nice if there were more than one browser engine around.

46:16In 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's nice to have more than one. There is one other one of note. It's WebKit, which is what Apple uses in Safari and 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.

46:58Apple 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? I can't tell, but to have a competition to allow Chromium to run on iPhone sounds like a good move.

47:35What do you think that would achieve? When you have a competition between different sections of the layer, it tends to improve innovation. You get more bright ideas out there. 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?

48:11This 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? So I'd have to do, I think we've been chatting to a bunch of tests to find out to what extent this is true. Yes, I've heard rumors that the, 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. Oh, 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.

48:47And 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. On desktop, if you have a Mac or a Windows PC or Linux, you are using web apps. 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 really is not. Even for Google's efforts on Android, right?

49:25Progressive 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? I think a more powerful browser on the iPhone would change that dynamic. That, to me, feels like for all of the things we've talked about, the future of the web has to happen on mobile. 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 in real ways for most people's experience of the web.

50:03And 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. Exactly, yeah. Do you have an iPhone or an Android phone? I have an iPhone. 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? Pretty much. I suppose if I'm going to read anything serious, I tend to read it on a laptop. 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 Interrupt is and how those products might actually solve these problems.

50:45Interrupt is a company I started to... It's IN for innovation, Interrupt for disruption, and interrupt.com was available also. That's very good. As a main name a few years ago. Interrupt is designed to do whatever it takes to bring the solid vision to the ecosystem And what Interrupt 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. The 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 too. We've worked, for example, with BBC.

51:42We 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. The Flanders, which is that speaking part of Belgium, it ended up from an interesting connection with Visa at the moment, because Visa wants to make sure they do the right thing in terms of personal data. when it comes to agentic commerce.

52:35There's a recent announcement recently by a few weeks ago, I'm a piece of about that. So if you're listening to Decoder and you want to go try Interrupt or a solid-based wallet, can you do it, or is this all happening at one level up? If you go to, yeah, so you go to solidproject.org. The operation system is sort of developed, available ready, but not ready for average, get on, get that edit on it. yes, but we'll be in a year or so. 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 of it then because it feels like it's in a lot of flux right now.

53:18It is, isn't it? 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. Let's do that. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining Decoder. Okay.

53:37I'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 decoder at theverge.com. 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 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 your podcasts.

54:04Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.