LISBON, Portugal — The website’s creator is unconvinced by the crypto visionaries’ plan for its future, saying we should “ignore” it.

Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, said 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 to discuss the impacts of new technologies,” said Berners-Lee, speaking on stage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon. “You have to understand what the terms we’re discussing mean, beyond the buzzwords.”

“In fact, it’s a real shame that the Ethereum folks have taken the real name Web3 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 world of technology 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 power players like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

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

While freeing our personal data from 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, is the solution.

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

“Ignore the Web3 stuff, random Web3 that was built on the blockchain,” he added. “We’re not using that for Solid.”

Berners-Lee said people often conflate Web3 with “Web 3.0,” his own proposal for reshaping the Internet. His new startup, Inrupt, aims to give users control of 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 stored in silos by a handful of Big Tech platforms, like Google and Facebook, who use it to “lock us into their platforms.”

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

His new startup aims to address 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 “Universal Common API”, or application programming interface, that allows applications to obtain data from any source.

Berners-Lee isn’t the only notable tech figure to have doubts about Web3. The move has been a punching bag for some leaders in Silicon Valley, 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.