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

Hi Melvin,

On 6/27/25 5:13 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
>
> 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> <mailto: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
>     <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Web_2.0&action=history&dir=prev>
>

I’m not trying to win any battle here.

I simply wanted to leave a reply—for the Web record—in response to Dan’s 
comment.

The history of Web 2.0 and the rise of the Web 3.0 moniker still has 
some gaps that need to be filled on the Web. I was actually pleasantly 
surprised to see that the relevant Wikipedia history has remained intact.

-- 
Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
Home Page:http://www.openlinksw.com
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