Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants us to “ignore” Web3

LISBON, Portugal — The creator of the web is not sold on crypto visionaries’ plan for the future and says we should “ignore” it.

Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, said on Friday that he does not see blockchain as a viable solution for building the next iteration of the internet.

He has his own web decentralization project called Solid.

“It’s important to clarify in order to discuss the impacts of new technologies,” said Berners-Lee, speaking on stage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon. “You need to understand what the terms that we discuss actually mean, beyond buzzwords.”

“It’s a real shame that the actual Web3 name was taken by the Ethereum people for the things they’re doing with the blockchain. In fact, Web3 isn’t the web at all.”

Web3 is a nebulous term in the tech world used to describe a hypothetical future version of the internet that is more decentralized than it is today and not dominated by a handful of powerful players like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

It involves a few technologies including blockchain, cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens.

While breaking our personal data out of the clutches of Big Tech is an ambition shared by Berners-Lee, he is not convinced that blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, will be the solution.

“Blockchain protocols may be good for some things, but they are not good for Solid,” he said, a web decentralization project led by Berners-Lee. “They are too slow too expensive and too public. Personal data stores must be fast, cheap and private.”

“Ignore the Web3 stuff, random Web3 that was built on blockchain,” he added. “We don’t use that for Solid.”

Berners-Lee said people too often confuse Web3 with “Web 3.0,” his own proposal to reshape the Internet. His new startup, Inrupt, aims to give users control over their own data, including how it is accessed and stored. The company raised $30 million in a funding round in December, TechCrunch reported.

Berners-Lee says our personal data is hidden by a handful of Big Tech platforms, such as Google and Facebook, which use it to “lock us into their platforms.”

“The result was a big data race where the winner was the company that controlled the most data and the losers were everyone else,” he said.

His new startup aims to solve this in three ways:

• A global single sign-on feature that allows anyone to log in from anywhere.
• Login IDs that allow users to share their data with others.
• A “common universal API,” or application programming interface, that allows apps to retrieve data from any source.

Berners-Lee is not the only notable tech figure to have doubts about Web3. The move has been a punching bag for some Silicon Valley leaders, such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Critics say it is prone to the same problems that come with cryptocurrencies, such as fraud and security flaws.