Open web initiatives Project Liberty and Solid could be teaming up | TechCrunch

Two initiatives to create a more open web, where users are in control of their own digital identities and data, may be coming together. At SXSW 2025, entrepreneur Frank McCourt, whose Project Liberty is developing open internet infrastructure (and is throwing its hat in the ring as a potential buyer for TikTok), announced that his organization has been in discussions with internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee about an integration with Solid, his open source project aimed at giving people control over their own data.

In a panel at SXSW, McCourt shared that his team had “talked to Tim Berners-Lee about Solid,” adding that “Project Liberty is compatible with Solid.”

Though he didn’t announce an official partnership, McCourt suggested that discussions were underway on a future collaboration.

“We’re debating, or talking, right now about how to incorporate that — him and Solid, his Solid Pods — into the project,” McCourt teased.

Berners-Lee, known as the father of the World Wide Web, announced in 2018 he had been working with a small team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop Solid. He had also tapped British engineer John Bruce to head up Inrupt, a startup built on top of the open source project.

Inrupt has gone on to launch a privacy platform aimed at enterprises, where people control their data in online storage entities called Personal Online Data Stores, or Pods for short.

With similar missions in mind, Berners-Lee has been supportive of Project Liberty’s efforts. He even backed its TikTok bid, saying: “This project has my support. The web I invented was to provide power and value to individuals, which they do not have at the moment.”

However, there has not been a formal collaboration between Solid and Inrupt and Project Liberty, the latter of which is focused on the development of Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP).

That protocol today is being adopted by a handful of apps and other projects, including MeWe; Soar.com (founded by Ancestry.com’s Paul Allen to build apps through a studio model); and the permissionless blockchain Frequency (developed by Project Liberty Labs).

Project Liberty also recently announced a partnership with Free Our Feeds, an effort focused on protecting the AT Protocol, which powers Bluesky’s social network.