Google exec challenges Berners-Lee (2006)
&gt; <i>&quot;What I get a lot is: &#x27;Why are you against the Semantic Web?&#x27; I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google&#x27;s point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first,. . . We deal with millions of Web masters who can&#x27;t configure a server, can&#x27;t write HTML. It&#x27;s hard for them to go to the next step.&quot;</i><p>Thankfully we have a bit more practice writing HTML today. Rdfa &amp; microdata are both fine markup formats for html that are not hard to understand. Rdfa first got semi-started in 2004, &amp; honestly, was not that challenging. More code-centric systems also have JSON-LD as an option, which is fairly simple to author.<p>What concerns me most though is that Norvig seems to be arguing a strong case of worse-is-better, claiming that since some people will find semantic web difficult to publish, it&#x27;s not worth doing at all. That we could be creating value, that we could be making information more rich is not of interest: the focus is on the downsides, is on creating an image of unsuccess, unpossibility. It&#x27;s a dissapointing framing &amp; difficult to try to move a conversation forward past this low bogland Norvig sets up.<p>&gt; <i>&quot;The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, &#x27;I&#x27;m the leader. Why should I standardize?&#x27;</i>&quot;<p>Today Google is a primary instigator&#x2F;driver of schema.org, along with Microsoft Yahoo, and Yandex. I&#x27;d say Google is the best evidence this hard problem wasn&#x27;t really so hard.<p>Also, there are other perfectly good ontologies out there that also coexist.<p>&gt; <i>&quot;The third problem is one of deception. We deal every day with people who try to rank higher in the results</i>&quot;<p>Again a problem specific to Google. Semantic web doesn&#x27;t have to be the authoritative source of truth &amp; 100% accurate to start to add value to the world, to make the information on the page meaningful &amp; semantic. But again Norvig is applying his specific demands to the Semantic Web, &amp; making an incredibly high bar.<p>---<p>The page has been a glossy synthetic produced whole object-artifact for a long time now. I for one continue to hope we can do what the semantic web promised: start to break down the things on the page, to define the page in terms of a construction of a bunch of different, individual, meaningful objects.<p>I don&#x27;t think truly empowering information &amp; augmenting people (in this semantic web style) is compatible with the mission statement of a company whose goal has been to &quot;organize and make available the world&#x27;s information,&quot; since such a company would be less needed if the information were better able to present &amp; make available itself. Norvig was taking down a huge threat, and one that indeed is not particularly helpful to his cause.