New Scientist - We want our internet back

A friend showed me this week's New Scientist on Saturday, and this was the
cover:


"We want our internet back - The grassroots fight to regain control and
what it means for you"

I assumed this would be based on the Decentralized Web Summit, and hoped it
might mention indieweb and the Social Web Working Group's recent Drafts.

“Very big and powerful companies own a huge chunk of what happens on the
web,” says Andrei Sambra, a developer with the World Wide Web (W3)
Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the main standards
organisation for the web. But we – the ones producing this valuable data –
have lost control.

The time has come to push back. Sambra is part of a growing movement to
wrest back control


then:

In a sense, that would be just getting back to the way the web was always
intended. The original World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee at the
particle physics centre CERN near Geneva in 1999, was a “decentralised”
affair. There were no central servers; websites ran on individual machines
in universities, offices and bedrooms. Hosting a site just meant plugging a
computer into your internet connection and having it serve up the HTML code
to anyone visiting. No one company ruled the roost.

Simple open protocols meant that anyone who knew what they were doing could
be a part of the burgeoning network. “A lot of the things that made the
early web wonderful were these open standards,” says Harry Halpin, also
with W3C. “This allowed a level of decentralisation, and lack of monopoly
control of the web.”

It sounds utopian, and in many ways it was – but far too fiddly for most
people to faff about with. Those open protocols are still there. But we
were lured away by convenience.


After more explanation of how silos are taking over, I was expecting a
mention of the SWWG from the 2 w3c people quoted. But no.

Sambra is working on a project called Solid, which is led by none other
than Berners-Lee himself. The idea behind this prototype software is to
separate our data from the apps and servers that process it. With Solid,
you get to decide where your data lives – on your phone, a server at work,
or with a cloud provider, as it probably does now. You can even nominate
friends to look after it. “We want to put the data in a place where the
user controls it,” says Sambra.

It talks more about Solid, and about Maidsafe, another interesting project,
but not a standard. Then, Harry again:

The answer, says Halpin, is for the developers working on different parts
of the distributed web to start talking to each other about their work,
something that doesn’t currently happen. “The community has to get together
with the adequate expertise and solve these hard problems and push open
standards,” he says. Open standards will make it easier for talented
developers to build applications without having to go through existing
networks.


I thought we were talking to each other. We have multiple specs going
through CR at the moment. How did this story not get told?