About six hours after TBD, the Bitcoin-centric subsidiary of Jack Dorsey’s Block, announced its intention to trademark the “Web5” name, the controversial plan was shelved, with TBD saying that the community’s voice was heard and that it was “responding to their concerns.”
TBD took to Twitter on Tuesday to announce its intention to seek protection for Web5, in a move designed to avoid confusion over the term’s meaning and “and ensure that the term is used as intended.”
Web5 – a purported “additional decentralized web platform” that will enable users to have direct control over identity and personal data – was announced in June 2022, with Dorsey saying at the time that “this will probably be our most important contribution to the internet.”
The idea is to build the next iteration of the internet that will combine the older Web2 model and the new conception of Web3, which enables developers to write Decentralized Web Apps (DWA) using Decentralized Identifiers (DID) that run on Bitcoin- the blockchain.
The decision to trademark the term “Web5,” according to TBD, while not intended to “prevent others from using Web5,” came in response to the desire to “establish a first way to defend the principles.”
“We are working on ways to enable commercial and non-commercial use of ‘Web5’ as long as participants respect the meaning of the term and maintain its main characteristics,” TBD said in a statement.
The community fights back
The transition to copyright, a term that reflected the ethos of decentralization, was met with a lukewarm response from society. Many commentators noted that this would contradict the very idea of a decentralized internet.
“Nothing says ‘free and decentralized’ like an organization being able to choose who is ‘free and decentralized,'” so one user.
“Welcome to the real decentralized web. you need our permission to use the term decentralized web… can’t tell the truth from the satire anymore. added another.
In an attempt to justify the move, TBD project lead Mike Brock so“we’ve seen people trying to sell ‘Web5’ tokens on casino exchanges and people trying to sell NFTs like ‘Web5’,” adding that the company wasn’t going to “take it down.”
According to Brock, the TBD would place the trademark for Web5 “under the control of an independent organization, not owned or controlled by Block.”
“Web5 has zero direct commercial benefit to Block. Everything we do is 100% open source, and our goal is to create an independent community organization and/or donate protocols to standards bodies. But we’re not going to let fraudsters operate under the color of Web5.” added Brock.
Despite TBD seemingly committing to its original plan, the resolution to the matter came sooner than many probably expected.
In their next tweet late Tuesday evening, TBD said, “we are suspending and rescinding our previously announced plan until further notice.”
“While our concerns here have not abated, we have heard loud voices in the community concerned about the potential for abuse of trademark law in ways that would undermine the mission of decentralization,” the tweet said.
TBD added that the goal is “to catalyze the community and make Web5 exist as its own thing, separate from TBD and Block. This move now, even given the aforementioned concerns, undermines people’s confidence in that mission.”
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