Re: Naming Clash: The W3C Web 3.0 Stack and "Web3"

po 23. 6. 2025 v 14:48 odesílatel Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
napsal:

>
> On 7/21/23 5:27 PM, Daniel Appelquist wrote:
>
> +1
>
> Dan
>
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Friday, July 21st, 2023 at 21:47, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
> <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
>
> Fwiw the TAG don’t systematically monitor this email list and haven’t for
> years (unless that changed recently). Github is the way to their attention.
>
> In passing…
>
> W3C has never really used “Web 3.0” (or 2.0) for its work. The whole
> reason “2.0” resonated rhetorically 20 years ago was because we all know
> you couldn’t really version the web like that. And the only reason people
> tried to claim “web 3.0” was the success of Tim O’Reilly’s original account
> of a cluster of trends he labelled “2.0”. It was more like an era - the era
> of “the dot com crash hasn’t killed this idea”. Given the attention it got,
> of course there was going to be an unseemly scramble to number, name and
> describe what came next. But it was never particularly serious. We should
> just stop acting like “web 3.0” means anything very specific or technical.
> The O’Reilly “web 2.0” was a good (because parodoxical) name for the
> “recovery from the dotcom crash” moment, not a spec. And “RDF as the third
> version of the web” was always laughable; it is one tool amongst many, and
> we all knew it.
>
> Dan
>
>
> Hi Dan,
> There’s more to this story than Tim O’Reilly’s coining of the “Web 2.0”
> term, as the Wikipedia history outlines [1].
>
> Web 2.0, as a Wikipedia topic and cultural meme (largely propelled through
> Tim’s promotional efforts), quickly became synonymous with how companies
> like Google—and others that followed—scaled hosted solutions into dominant
> business models (Tim even said this verbatim during a Tag session that I
> attended, alongside TimBL, in Banff circa 2007). For those of us who viewed
> the Web’s evolution through a broader lens—where identity authenticity was
> key to a truly read-write Web—this forced a pivot toward the “Web 3.0”
> label.
>
> It wasn’t a superficial reaction to what Tim O’Reilly was championing. It
> was a deliberate effort to safeguard the Semantic Web Project’s vision,
> where unambiguous identity is ground zero. Many of us recognized the
> structural flaws and societal risks baked into Web 2.0 even at the time.
>
> I believe history will ultimately be kind to those who tried to avert what
> Web 2.0 has become, as its societal impact becomes clearer by the day—even
> as we now watch the same playbook being used to push the Web3 moniker,
> further obscuring what Web 3.0 was truly meant to deliver.
>

Hi Kingsley,

Nice to hear from you.  This thread is about 2 years old, and it's fair to
say a lot has happened in that time!

- Web 3.0: our old Linked-Data tool-kit riding on royalty-free Web
standards.

- “Web3”: a re-branded, trademarked, token-metered stack that never shared
the Web’s architecture.

A few TAG folks called the mismatch (web-washing) but we never reached a
joint statement.

It’s a bit like someone trademarking “USB-5” and charging a coin each time
you plug in: clever branding, but miles from the spirit of royalty-free
standards.

You don’t get to win every battle.

Melvin


> Links:
>
> [1]
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Web_2.0&action=history&dir=prev
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Kingsley Idehen 
> Founder & CEO
> OpenLink Software
> Home Page: http://www.openlinksw.com
> Community Support: https://community.openlinksw.com
>
> Social Media:
> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen
> Twitter : https://twitter.com/kidehen
>
>