Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants us to 'ignore' Web3: 'Web3 is not the web at all'

LISBON, Portugal — The creator of the web isn't sold connected crypto visionaries' program for its aboriginal and says we should "ignore" it.

Tim Berners-Lee, the British machine idiosyncratic credited with inventing the World Wide Web successful 1989, said Friday that helium doesn't presumption blockchain arsenic a viable solution for gathering the adjacent iteration of the internet.

He has his ain web decentralization task called Solid.

"It's important to clarify successful bid to sermon the impacts of caller technology," said Berners-Lee, speaking onstage astatine the Web Summit lawsuit successful Lisbon. "You person to recognize what the presumption mean that we're discussing really mean, beyond the buzzwords."

"It's a existent shame successful information that the existent Web3 sanction was taken by Ethereum folks for the worldly that they're doing with blockchain. In fact, Web3 is not the web astatine all."

Web3 is simply a nebulous word successful the tech satellite utilized to picture a hypothetical aboriginal mentation of the net that's much decentralized than it is contiguous and not dominated by a fistful of almighty players specified as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

It involves a fewer technologies, including blockchain, cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens.

While breaking our idiosyncratic information retired of Big Tech's clutches is an ambition shared by Berners-Lee, he's not convinced blockchain, the distributed ledger exertion that underpins cryptocurrencies similar bitcoin, volition beryllium the solution.

"Blockchain protocols whitethorn beryllium bully for immoderate things but they're not bully for Solid," a web decentralization task led by Berners-Lee, helium said. "They're excessively dilatory excessively costly and excessively public. Personal information stores person to beryllium fast, inexpensive and private."

"Ignore the Web3 stuff, random Web3 that was built connected blockchain," helium added. "We're not utilizing that for Solid."

Berners-Lee said radical excessively often conflate Web3 with "Web 3.0," his ain connection for reshaping the internet. His caller startup, Inrupt, aims to springiness users power of their ain data, including however it's accessed and stored. The institution raised $30 cardinal successful a backing circular successful December, TechCrunch reported.

Berners-Lee says that our idiosyncratic information is siloed by a fistful of Big Tech platforms, similar Google and Facebook, that usage it to "lock america into their platforms."

"The effect was a large information contention wherever the victor was the 1 corp that controlled the astir information and the losers were everybody else," helium said.

His caller startup aims to code this done 3 ways:

• A planetary "single sign-on" diagnostic that lets anyone log successful from anywhere.
• Login IDs that let users to stock their information with others.
• A "common cosmopolitan API," oregon exertion programming interface, that lets apps propulsion information from immoderate source.

Berners-Lee's not the lone notable tech fig with doubts astir Web3. The question has been a punching bag for immoderate leaders successful Silicon Valley, like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Critics accidental it's prone to the aforesaid issues that travel with cryptocurrencies, similar fraud and information flaws.