ProtonMail Approaches Sir Tim Berners-Lee As a Consultant

Even if Proton, known as the operator of the encrypted e-mail service ProtonMail, is currently facing some criticism, the company is sticking to its mission to make data protection omnipresent on the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee, who is known as the “father of the Internet”, is now also helping.

According to The Register, Proton announced that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, one of the most prominent advocates of a free and yet secure Internet, was brought on board as a consultant. Berners-Lee is now part of the advisory team at Proton Technologies AG, which, with ProtonMail, offers one of the most well-known services for the secure handling of encrypted e-mails.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee was fundamentally involved in the development of the Internet we know today after the decision to merge hypertext with the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Domain Name System (DNS) in the late 1980s, ultimately creating the World Wide Web (WWW) emerged, which we still use today.

Common past at CERN

As the makers of ProtonMail and the other services of Proton AG, the researcher worked at CERN in Geneva, which is why they share a common past, says Andy Yen, CEO of the company. When Lee once created the web, a new medium emerged that changed the world, also because people were given the opportunity to make connections with one another.

At Proton, they are trying to achieve similarly high goals, says Yen. It is about creating an Internet in which users have full control over their information at all times. Berners-Lee is ideally suited to understand this concept behind Proton and to advise the company accordingly in order to achieve this ambitious vision.

Proton could be the advice from the Web inventor certainly make good use of the company but the criticism must accept a storm, because the IP address of a user to the Swiss authorities had passed on that one, unlike initially claimed, but chronicled what ultimately led to the arrest of an activist from the left political spectrum in France.