More control over your data. No blockchain. And your own personal artificial intelligence assistant, like ChatGPT.

These are all part of the vision of the future of the web, according to internet inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and CEO of Inrupt John Bruce, who spoke on CNBC’s Beyond The Valley podcast published Friday.

Inrupt is a company they co-founded which aims to deliver the web inventors’ original vision of the way the internet should work.

Berners-Lee said that when he invented the web in 1989, “if you were sufficiently switched on geeky, you could get yourself a computer. And you could put a web server on it, you could plug it into the internet. And you could have a website.”

“The spirit of the web was incredibly empowering to individuals,” he said.

But in his view, something has gone wrong since, with the concentration of power now in the hands of large internet companies.

“Well, everybody’s on Facebook, so they don’t have the website. They all use Mark Zuckerberg’s website,” Berners-Lee said.

“When people look you up on Facebook, you don’t control actually what they see … Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms control what news gets fed to them as they’re looking at your stuff,” he told CNBC.

“That’s very disempowering. It is very useful to Facebook. They have a lot of data about people that they they use for targeting them with advertisements … but what we’ve lost is the ability for individuals to have power.”

His solution? A product that allows users to control their data and how it’s used. Currently, internet companies collect data on users by default, as a way of using their services.

But Berners-Lee and Bruce’s start-up Inrupt is working on a different way forward. The aim is for users to have a single sign-on across different products and services on the internet.

Data will be stored in so-called “pods,” which are basically a person’s personal data online storage container. Individuals can grant a website or service access to their pod, or silo of data, rather than websites taking data by default.

The system is built on an open protocol on the internet called Solid.

“And that’s the ‘yin’ and the ‘yang’ of Inrupt, which is the personal empowerment. And the opportunity for individuals to take more command over their role on the web,” Bruce told CNBC’s Beyond The Valley.

Such an idea would require buy-in from large internet players. But Bruce said there is an “endless trudge” from companies to get more data on users, so they can target them with products and services. But the endeavour is showing diminishing returns for companies, he said.

“The other way of doing it is instead of, you know, figuring out blindly ‘Are you the likely candidate for my product or service?’ How about I just ask you in a legitimate way? And you tell me,” Bruce said, referencing the idea that users would be able to share the data that they want with companies from their pod.

Users will also need to change their behavior, and there needs to be a desire to control their data in this way. Berners-Lee admitted this change wouldn’t come overnight but instead “bit by bit.”

Backed by Microsoft, ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot, that responds to questions from users.

Some have termed it Web3, which proponents say will be a decentralized version of the internet — one that is not dominated by a handful of powerful players such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.