WWW creator Tim Berners-Lee closes down his foundation

The World Wide Web Foundation, the organization whose mission has been to make the web safer and more accessible, has shut down, according to The Register. The foundation, which close its virtual doors Sept. 27, says its mission has largely been fulfilled and other organizations can take over the work.

When the organization was founded in 2009, just over 20% of the world’s population had access to the internet, with few groups working to change that reality. Today, that number has climbed to around 70%, and many organizations are working to raise it higher.

The foundation’s co-founders, World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Rosemary Leith, said in a statement posted on the Foundation’s site that there are other challenges they want to focus on.

In particular, they write, is the social media companies’ model of commoditizing user data and concentrating power on the platforms, which runs counter to Berners-Lee’s original vision for the web. The foundation was wound down so he can focus on decentralized technologies such as the Solid Protocol, a specification that allows users to securely store data in decentralized data storage units known as Pods.

That technology has been under development since at least 2015.