The business model of today’s centralized web does not only impact our privacy, but also stifles innovation. There can only be one winner, i.e. the one who has most data. And in many sectors, those winners have already been established. This leaves them with little incentive to innovate. After all, why would you change a winning game?

Social media companies are not the only players in the big data game. Almost every company collects information on its clients and is – in a way – a big data company. Even supermarkets track and analyze what you are buying and send you personalized ads based on your profile. For many of these companies, data is merely a means to an end: they need data to optimize their services or sales, but they actually have no direct interest in owning or managing it. In addition, owning data is increasingly becoming a liability for companies, especially since the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) came into effect: if they store it, they also have to be able to protect it.

Imagining a decentralized web

By 2035, we will have regained control of our personal data. What this means is that we will get the choice to store our data wherever we want, independently of the applications we use. Our personal data will be stored in so-called ‘data pods’ that we control ourselves. In an ideal world, we will have multiple data pods per user, e.g. one for personal data, one for work-related information, one for official documents, etc. Everything we post will be saved in one of our own data pods, which are stored on a server of our choice.

To enable something like a social network, we would of course need to share some of our data. Only, in the decentralized web of 2035, we will get to choose – for each application separately – which data pod we want to make available.

We will also remain the owner of the data – no copies will be made – instead we will just link the application to the parts of our data pod we are willing to open up. To make this possible, one important condition has to be met: applications must be able to reuse data created by other applications.

To explain this with a present-day example: suppose all your friends are on Facebook, but you prefer a less popular alternative like Ello. In 2019, choosing Ello would imply that you cannot interact with any of your friends (unless you are a trendsetter and can convince them to join you on Ello – but then we are merely replacing one point of centralization by another). In 2035, it will not matter which social networking site your friends use. As applications will no longer own any data, they will merely become different interfaces to view information from your friends’ data pods. So, on Ello, you would be able to see – and interact with – your friends’ posts on Facebook. Switching between applications would thus become easy and competition between them would be based on service quality rather than data ownership.