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

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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli 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 use 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 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. 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 he helped develop an interrupt called Charlie. We've spent a lot of time here in Dakota over the past couple 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. 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 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.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, you are the inventor of the World Wide Web and co-founder and CTO of Inrupt. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you for having me. 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.

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 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. 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, New York Times is constantly saying, please download the app. Or BBC says, please use the app. They're always trying 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.

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. I can keep track of all the hundreds of podcasts I'm interested in. It's a bit like keeping bookmarks on the original browser. You, 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. 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. 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. In 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 need to rebuild.

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. That came from when I was given the chance to participate in the...

The London Olympics 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 Nexus computer, on the stage, in the stadium. And when I hit return, then that phrase went... go around the stadium in LED lights and then off over the internet. So we decided that this is for everyone as a way of really encapsulating what was most important about the web.

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 it's closed down a type of freedom, a type of digital sovereignty. How would you make the argument in response?

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 people, you know who you are, you're building the TikTok backend, 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. If I get videos on YouTube, on YouTube I find that I can...

Stop scrolling through them. I don't end up scrolling through them forever. If I was on TikTok, I'd probably end up scrolling through them forever. 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. 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? 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 realise that. They manage 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. made it one web, then one web would take off and become huge. And then part of that web would be itself huge. Could you make that argument today? And what technology would you make it about?

I think a lot of people would wonder about whether you could make it, 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 developer of AI, but also the prevention of everything running away, that you can build containers around it, for example. 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? I think it's really, yeah. No, I think it's really hard. I don't see it happening.

One of the characters in AI now that people are obviously aware of is Mark 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 the Netscape. There was a profile view in the New Yorker recently, and you said in that that you felt Andreessen 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? No, I don't think they hijacked. They did try to, originally with Mosaic, 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 Netoscape, they lost the battle to brand it as Mosaic.

I've never been against commercialization at 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. The reason I saw that 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 to 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 bigger? I think there are people in there. There are people like Demis Hassabis who has called for some of those people. If you have a government-funded law... philanthropically funded non-profit, and you invited to it all of those people who've expressed a concern, then you could maybe put them together and build something like a CERN for AI.

I think it's going to be a very tough job trying to get most of the players out there to slow down for a second. Dennis Tassabas is 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 Pachai, the CEO of Google, about that comment. 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. summarizing information or maybe even using 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. 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? I think 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 of all the flow of data which is being produced by people who make their money from advertising.

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. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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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 about 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'd put the information there. 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. also feels like it will change the web in huge ways. Do you see that split? And how do you think AI factors into the web as an application platform? Yes, I do that split.

And as an application platform, I'm concerned that if the AI does not feed the search engine, it does not feed the blogs, 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 extra serial puzzle data. So it interrupts. We've built a company. We've built a version of AI. of 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. I think that without that ability to...

act 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.

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 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.

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? And all of them...

Two at 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? That's basically the answer, and then it doesn't play out that way. How would you build that business? 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.

Supposing your AI as it did that, it made note of everything that it ordered from DoorDash. It had a note of all things 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, 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 door dashes. 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 more so 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. 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. So your AI buys something that at some point it uses something like Visa.

When it uses the payment platform, for example, Interruptor has been talking to Visa about the future of agent e-commerce. And so there's various architects around that where the payment provider can... track what's going on, what's being bought, and check the metadata 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 Visa work with your data a lot. So I'm 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. 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. 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? 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'll store data either in the web or they store data on your local device. So it's a good place to be. is that the data is all stored on your local device. It's 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. 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 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? Yeah, I don't think users demanded the cookie dough. 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. It was a 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 it. 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 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, the subspace is, you know, some parts of your lives where it hasn't. paid out. Like when you use Apple things, you store things in the iCloud. Google things stored in your G Cloud. Microsoft 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. I 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, 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 and you should give up a lot of control because you need the convenience of somebody else being in charge.

You can see this broadly in the IT space. 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. 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?

It'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 OpenMoon... 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. and somebody in the cloud. I think you're in the 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.

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. 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 force that 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? There's a big split across the Atlantic. Obviously, we see in Europe there's more push towards regulation. There's more activity around.

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 do 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 a different industry. Next moment you're worrying about AGI. and super intelligent. 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?

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. 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. 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 a new class of applications and services and user experiences. As a young person in college reading.

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. 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...

That 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. I 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, you know, the open street map 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 in somatic web data. You put machine-needed data in your website.

then the Google search engine will build a mental model of your band or whatever it is, your music, whatever it is you're selling, to those ways with the LinkedIn Data Group. We go sort of 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 AI is... use the semantic web to communicate with each other. There is a web of data which is generated by AIs and used by AIs. people and also mainly used by AIs because AIs find that once they've extracted the data, the most efficient thing is to exchange that data in a semantic way.

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. some of the interoperability that we were looking for from the semantic web being available. We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.

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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, 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. 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. They are in the business of extraction. And it feels like a lot of norms on 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? 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. to write things like rules, so 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 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'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. 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. But putting the robot power of implementing robot text in the hands of Cloudflare, that's in a way in a strange way.

Yeah. Strange twists. Yeah. It's just, you know, 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 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 doesn't feel that's appropriate, but he's found that...

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. We'll 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? No, of course. I don't feel an essentialised provider at any level. Quantity distribution networks or any level of the web, obviously. A centralised 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.

or an NWCC every now and again over decades. There's been projects at MIT, for example, for micropayments and so on. So suddenly payment required error code. So the idea that people would pay for information on the web. But of course, whether you're an AI... a crawler or whether you're an individual person or 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. Microsoft is rolling out the features in Edge. On and on down the line.

At last, CNN, 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. 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'd be nice to have more than one. There's one other one. 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. 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 a new browser innovation? I can't but tell but to have.

To have a competition to allow Chrome to run on iPhones 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. 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 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? 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... But I can't substantiate them. Now 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. And I think most users would tell you that it is not. 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, 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, 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? 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, 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 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. 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. 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 Interrupt. You're building digital wallets. Explain to folks what Interrupt is and how those products might actually solve these problems. Interrupt is a company... I started to, it's IN for innovation, interrupt for disruption, and interrupt.com was available also. That's the main name a few years ago.

design 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. a product called ESS, the Enterprise Solid Server, which is not open source, it's engineered to be scalable and secure, and then actually worked with a bunch of people too.

We've worked, for example, with BBC. We worked on a project to give people to log on to the BBC. They would get themselves a little data wallet on the side in which they could... They do have a watch party, and the watch party demo worked with real people, or worked using DataWallet, the Flanders government. The way the founders' government interfaces with citizens is through these solid-compatible data wallets, which is that speaking part of Belgium.

We've got 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. There was a recent announcement recently, a few weeks ago, about that. So if you're listening to the coder 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? Yeah, so you can go to solidproject.org.

The operating system is a developer available ready, but not ready for everybody to get on and get an edit on it. Yes, but it will 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. It is, isn't it? Isn't it?

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. Let's do that. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining the Cutter. Okay.

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 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 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. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

The show is produced by Kate Cox, 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. Do your work with ease and speed. PDF spaces is all you need. Do hours of research in an instant. With key insights from an AI assistant. Take a template with a click. Now your Prezzo looks super slick. Close that deal. Yeah, you won. Do that. Doing that.

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