Agentic Web Here Decade
The editor's framing is sharp: Berners-Lee's Semantic Web flopped because it demanded humans hand-annotate the internet with formal ontologies, while LLM agents achieve a similar goal by inferring meaning from messy pages as-is. But the analogy cuts both ways — today's agents lack the plumbing the 2001 paper took for granted: identity, payments, permissions, and incentives for site owners.… more
If agents consume content yet users never click through, publishers will wall off or even poison their pages for machines, and Cloudflare's AI-crawler blocking already points that way. In our view, the agentic web will be decided less by model quality than by whether an economic settlement emerges between agents and the sites they visit. Protocols like MCP and A2A hint at the infrastructure layer that may make it real.
The agentic web is here
In 2001, a decade after he invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision. Together with two colleagues, he published an article in the magazine Scientific American in which he outlined what he called the “Semantic Web”: an internet designed to be navigated by autonomous software agents that could add…
Source:
MIT Technology Review
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