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

pá 27. 6. 2025 v 18:00 odesílatel Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
napsal:

> 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>
>> <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
>>
>
> 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.
>

Appreciate the history, Kingsley, and appreciate most TAG work’s on GitHub
these days.

Adding one last example from today: https://deno.com/blog/deno-v-oracle4

“Everyone knows JavaScript isn’t an Oracle product” … yet the trademark
lives on. Same pattern as “Web3” claiming the Web.


> --
> Regards,
>
> Kingsley Idehen 
> Founder & CEO
> OpenLink Software
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