Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants us to ’ignore’ Web3
▻https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/04/web-inventor-tim-berners-lee-wants-us-to-ignore-web3.html
Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web, said he doesn’t view blockchain as a viable solution for building the next iteration of the internet.
“In fact, Web3 is not the web at all,” he told an audience at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon.
Berners-Lee said people too often conflate Web3 with “Web 3.0,” his own proposal for reshaping the internet.
“It’s a real shame in fact that the actual Web3 name was taken by Ethereum folks for the stuff that they’re doing with blockchain. In fact, Web3 is not the web at all.”
Web3 is a nebulous term in the tech world used to describe a hypothetical future version of the internet that’s more decentralized than it is today and not dominated by a handful of powerful players such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
It involves a few technologies, including blockchain, cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens.
While breaking our personal data out of Big Tech’s clutches is an ambition shared by Berners-Lee, he’s not convinced blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, will be the solution.
His new startup aims to address this through three ways:
A global “single sign-on” feature that lets anyone log in from anywhere.
Login IDs that allow users to share their data with others.
A “common universal API,” or application programming interface, that lets apps pull data from any source.
Berners-Lee’s not the only notable tech figure with doubts about Web3. The movement has been a punching bag for some leaders in Silicon Valley, like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Critics say it’s prone to the same issues that come with cryptocurrencies, like fraud and security flaws.