Berners-Lee's Inrupt releases first commercial offering, the privacy-preserving Enterprise Solid Server

ESS offers a route to 'inclusive capitalism', says CEO John Bruce

Inrupt, the company set up two years ago by Tim Berners-Lee and entrepreneur John Bruce to further the "redecentralisation" of the web, released its first commercial product today, an enterprise open source version of Solid Server, ESS.

Solid is a set of open protocols that allow individuals to control their own data, be that browsing habits, musical preferences, health records, driving licence or what have you - in their own personal online data store - or 'Pod' - to which granular access can be granted or denied to applications as and when the user sees fit. Pods can be stored on whatever infrastructure the user chooses, and are a way of decoupling the data from the applications that use it. This is in stark contrast to the way a company like Facebook operates, building profiles of users over which they have no control, little visibility and no way of transferring to another app.

Solid Server, which enables deployment and management of these Pods, has been developed as an open source project for a number of years, but Inrupt has bought in the some industry heavy-hitters, including security guru Bruce Schneier and privacy specialist Devi Ottenheimer, formerly of MongoDB, to build in security, compliance and other features required by large organisations that could, potentially, look to deploy millions of Pods. The company is offering services around that too, although mainly through third-parties.

Despite operating largely under the radar so far, and no doubt because of the star-power of TBL, Solid has already attracted $20 million in investment and the interest of the BBC, the NHS, Mastercard and perhaps most impressively so far the Government of Flanders in Belgium which plans to roll out Pods to all its citizens in which they can store official documentation such as driving licences and marriage certificates. However, cautions Bruce, ESS and other elements of Solid are still at a relatively early stage.

"Well, I wouldn't recommend my Mum use it just yet. At the moment it's for large organisations with specific use cases and enterprise and open source developers who want to build apps on it," he said.

However, Bruce insists that interest in Solid extends to the upper tiers of management in companies with an interest in "inclusive capitalism", where customers are more engaged in the personalisation of offers, for example. Other organisations see the advantages of outsourcing personal data management to the users themselves. These include including the NHS in Manchester which is looking at ways patients could proactively manage their own medical records.

Currently, there are three main use cases or advantages to be had from the Solid architecture, Bruce said. Firstly, organisations that maintain vast data lakes of customer information could benefit from offloading that burden to the consumer, at the same time fostering a more trusting relationship with them; which, secondly, could up new sources of data with consumers "trading the right to be forgotten for the right to be understood". In other words, people will be more willing to share personal information if there is a tangible advantage for them, he believes. The third use case is managing credentials, as in the Flanders project, and also Mastercard, which is experimenting with Pods to hold refugees' identity documents.

Bruce hopes that by releasing a working - if slightly warts-and-all - version of ESS, progress will accelerate as new developers and users come on board.

"We've got to get going now. Notwithstanding the fact there are a couple of pieces of the puzzle still to be fleshed out, it's at the point now where a big organisation could evaluate it and know with confidence that what we're looking at here is real, rather than the prototype open source project that Tim originally had, and the more people who put their shoulder to this the faster we're going to get there."

On the technical side, asked about possible performance issues due to the latency inherent in storing data in lots of small decentralised stores rather than one big one, Bruce professed not to have a handle on all the details but said that CDN vendor Akamai is an investor with plans to use Pods as edge storage devices.

And what of Berners-Lee's vision of a redecentralised web?

"That's the goal that keeps us motivated," Bruce said. "But to get from here to there is all about adoption. What I chose to do [rather than have it grow organically] is go to massive organisations and say, consider this like you would any classic enterprise grade technology. Consider whether or not this technology can service your customers in new ways that conform or align with your business strategy. And I believe I'm going to get a lot of yeses to that."