From a New.com article, Google exec challenges Berners-Lee

“What I get a lot is: ‘Why are you against the Semantic Web?’ I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google’s point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first,” Norvig said. Norvig clarified that it was not Berners-Lee or his group that he was referring to as incompetent, but the general user.

“We deal with millions of Web masters who can’t configure a server, can’t write HTML. It’s hard for them to go to the next step. The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, ‘I’m the leader. Why should I standardize?’ The third problem is one of deception. We deal every day with people who try to rank higher in the results and then try to sell someone Viagra when that’s not what they are looking for. With less human oversight with the Semantic Web, we are worried about it being easier to be deceptive,” Norvig said.

I’m certainly not in the level of Norvig or TBL to be participating in this discussion intelligently. But I think the point Norvig is trying to make is that the semantic web will eventually appear, but not the way TBL envisioned it. There will be a lot of “fuzziness” to the way webmasters adhere to the RDF (whatever standards/standard that will emerge). In the end, there will always be a need for an intelligent normalization layer that “attempts” to find pattern, context, and meaning out of all the loseness of the data that is on the web. A simple parser will not be able to “absorb” or read the semantic web (or atleast the entire semantic web). The Google search engine is probably in the best position out of all the EXISTING technologies out there to be that layer, it kind of is for humans. The unfortunate ramification (that TBL would be sad to admit) is that SOMEONE will own the semantic web, not as a standards body or content owner, but as the normalization/extraction layer. If Google is able to garner monopolitic growth without a naturally monopolitic product or business model (search engine), it is not without a huge leap of faith that in the future a player (maybe google) will be able to exact a toll for being the de facto router/translator of data on the web. . . this is a scary thought . . . the end of the open web? (and these guys are freaked out about net neutrality?)