Opinion | Yes, the Internet Is Broken. But What Does a Fix Look Like?

Back to the nerds: On Tuesday Berners-Lee published an open letter on Medium that said the web was intended “to be a tool to empower humanity” that “was decentralized with a long tail of content and options.” In the past decade, though, he wrote, “instead of embodying these values, the web has instead played a part in eroding them.”

Berners-Lee is developing and proselytizing for a new system that gives each person his or her own personal online-only data store, or POD for short. The PODs let people decide how their data is managed, used and shared. The Flanders region of Belgium has already authorized PODs for all of its citizens, Berners-Lee wrote. He co-founded a company, Inrupt, that’s built on the concept of PODs and the computer servers associated with them.

Tuesday was also the publication date of a book by the billionaire entrepreneur Frank McCourt titled, “Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age.” McCourt, a former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, isn’t a tech guy himself, but he has assembled a team to develop a more human-centered internet.

The key technology of McCourt’s initiative, Project Liberty, is the D.S.N.P., for Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. It’s designed to allow customers to wrest away control of the data about them from the social media giants such as Facebook and TikTok. Your “social graph” — a map of your digital relationships — sits on a decentralized database managed by a third party who can’t see the data being stored. You can remain anonymous, but if you want to share your views widely you may be required to you identify yourself. One social network, MeWe, has moved nearly 700,000 of its roughly 20 million users onto a D.S.N.P.-based system that uses blockchain.

These are just two of many overlapping and sometimes conflicting attempts to democratize the web. Web 1.0 was Berners-Lee’s original World Wide Web, which was mostly read-only. Web 2.0 encompasses social media and user-generated content, with lots of interactivity. Web 3.0 is intended to be more decentralized, with no single point of failure and, as Berners-Lee puts it, no kill switch.