WTN #6: Welcome, Humans and Bots, to the Agentic Web

This week I have been looking closely at how the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been moving to integrate AI into the web platform. In my analysis for The New Stack, I looked at a W3C group called the AI Agent Protocol Community Group, whose co-chairs (both from China) spoke recently at a W3C event in Hangzhou called “WebEvolve 2025 Annual Event.” While this is all early stage, I found it interesting that these W3C members see the "Agentic Web" (their term) as the successor to the Semantic Web, which of course largely failed to take off.

I also brought into the discussion current AI agent developments from Tim Berners-Lee's Inrupt, and the three MCP-related open source projects I've been reporting on recently: MCP-UI, NLWeb and WebMCP. The third one, WebMCP, is a new project I mentioned in WTN #4; I am currently organizing an interview with Microsoft about it. So MCP is driving a lot of 'agentic web' action currently, but TBL's Solid-based project — including his work on an AI personal assistant called "Charlie" — brings a different, more W3C-based, flavor.

As I concluded in my TNS post, the Agentic Web is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed. (Apologies to William Gibson and Tim O'Reilly!)

Web Platform

🌐 Speaking of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, his memoir, This Is For Everyone, was published this week. I'd pre-ordered a signed copy and when it arrived on Wednesday, I was stunned to discover that my name is in the book! As I noted on social media, he did misspell it, but never mind...I'm just very happy and honoured to be mentioned.

🌐 Discussion about the United States vs. Google antitrust trial continued this week, with many commentators criticizing the judge for not penalizing Google more for its search monopoly. Some have suggested that the judge should've ordered Chrome and Android to be spun out into non-profits. Meanwhile, John Newman, a professor at the University of Memphis School of Law, seemed more concerned about the massive payments Google makes to Apple and Mozilla to be their default search engine. Newman wrote on The Sling:

"A remedy order “must seek” to accomplish multiple goals, one of which is ensuring “that there remain no practices likely to result in monopolization in the future.” That instruction should have prompted, at minimum, a ban on all of Google’s current illegal payment deals."

🌐 Meanwhile, there is another Google antitrust trial about to go to the "remedies" phase — this one regarding Google's adtech. Jason Kint spotted an interesting admission from Google in its defense papers: "The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline..." As others noted, this contradicts recent comments by Google execs that "the web is thriving."

Casey Newton later reported that Google intends to "re-file a legal brief" to clarify "that they were only talking about open-web display advertising." Hmm, I think they were right the first time!

🌐 W3C: The CSS Working Group has published CSS Snapshot 2025 as a Group Note.

Open Social Web

🦣 Emelia Smith, a fediverse developer, published a "statement on discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol," imploring both dev communities to play nicely together. Wouldn't you know it, the statement led to heated discussions in the comments...well, this is social media after all. Anyway, I agree 100% with the following sentiment:

"There does not have to be a “winning” protocol. We do not build a better open social web for everyone by fighting and arguing about protocol superiority. That is not how we achieve a better open social web. Instead, we must work together, cross-pollinate and share ideas, and participate within each other's communities with respect and mutual understanding. Arguing between us only emboldens those that seek to derail and destroy efforts to build an open social web."

🦋 I also liked Laurens Hof's post on why he ultimately just wants an "ethical internet" and thus supports both protocols:

"I’m not interested in ‘decentralisation’ in itself as a goal. I’m interesting in building an ethical internet, where the tools we use as a society for sense-making are not captured by oligarchs."

🌉 Speaking of playing nice together...Bridgy Fed has introduced a notifications feature, so that when unbridged users interact with your bridged Mastodon or Bluesky account, you'll get a DM (why DM? To respect user privacy).

📰 Techmeme, the tech news aggregator, turned 20 this week. I was one of its beta testers back in 2005 and wrote one of the first reviews; I also met and befriended the founder, Gabe Rivera, at the end of September 2005, on my first trip to Silicon Valley. But back to 2025...Fred Vogelstein spoke to Rivera on its 20th anniversary:

Techmeme looks and works exactly the same way as it always has. And it has never been more popular. Traffic is up 25 percent this year, likely driven by the explosion of interest in AI...

Web + AI

🤖 Worrying new statistics from Tollbit: human visitors to websites declined nearly 10% from Q1 to Q2 this year. In the first quarter, 1 in 200 visitors was AI; in the second quarter, it was 1 in 50. (via Brian Morrissey)

🤖 OpenAI has added full support for MCP tools in ChatGPT. "It's powerful but dangerous, and is intended for developers who understand how to safely configure and test connectors," states the documentation.

🤖 Related: ChatGPT can now integrate with Vercel MCP.

🤖 Anthropic releases Web fetch tool, which "allows Claude to retrieve full content from specified web pages and PDF documents."; also see these safety tips from Simon Willison.

🤖 Microsoft has released MCP Interviewer, "as an open-source CLI tool (opens in new tab), so server developers can automatically evaluate their MCP servers with agent usability in mind, and users can validate new servers."

🤖 Ars Technica on RSL — Really Simple Licensing — which "makes it easier for creators to get paid for AI scraping." Clearly inspired by RSS, supporting companies include Reddit, Yahoo! and O'Reilly Media. Here's more information about the people behind it:

"The standard was created by the RSL Collective, which was founded by Doug Leeds, former CEO of Ask.com, and Eckart Walther, a former Yahoo vice president of products and co-creator of the RSS standard, which made it easy to syndicate content across the web."

One More Thing

🪟 I find Apple's new "Liquid Glass" UI for iOS to be very underwhelming — I can't help but think Steve Jobs would never have let this slide. But it seems Apple designers (and the rest of us) will just have to live with it. So, with tongue in cheek, Thomas Günther has some advice for website designers.

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