I just got back from W3C TPAC 2025 in Kobe, Japan. I participate in the Web of Things working group. This year’s Plugfest (European word for hackathon) brought together dozens of companies building solutions for the open web.

I left consumed by one thought: most builders are being restricted by two kinds of constraints.

The ones they don’t know they have. And the ones they refuse to set.

The Invisible Prison

The first kind, unconscious constraints, is what my newsletter is about: the limitations we inherit from culture, industry norms, what we think is possible. Our ideas are only as big as we can imagine, and most of us can't imagine very big. Look at Y Combinator's co-founder matching: dozens of small ideas when people should be thinking bigger. They should be thinking about platforms and solutions that are bigger than the problem they are trying to solve. I do understand that when starting a company, you cannot eat the whole elephant at once, but when reviewing these applications, I am always looking for "Is that person able to think big?" And rarely do I see it go beyond their smaller niche. I watch companies build "innovative solutions" that are just prettier versions of the same cage everyone else is building. They're rearranging furniture in a prison they don't see. This post, though, is about the second kind: the constraints we refuse to set.

What We’re Not Constraining

While trapped in unconscious limitations, we also refuse to set constraints that actually matter. The ones that make products trustworthy. The ones that make the world better.

With “growth at all costs” and “move fast and break things” as gospel, we’re not constraining ourselves to respect user privacy. We’re not building truly open, interoperable systems that follow open standards. We’re not putting people in control of their own data. We optimize only for growth. Defensibility. Vendor lock-in. Shareholder value.

In the process, we build the next generation of digital prisons for our consumers. Then tell ourselves it’s just “good business.” It’s not. It’s the quickest hit of cash and getting revenue so we can sell it off and be insanely wealthy disguised as strategy.

There’s a better way. What's more, is that an Open web and growth aren’t mutually exclusive. We can respect user privacy and charge money for good products. We can build shareholder value through real partnerships, integrating with other companies on open standards. We can grow because users trust us, not because we’ve locked them in.

The World Wide Web Consortium Way

At TPAC 2025, I was surrounded by people who've figured this out. In the normal world you are representing your company, your technology, your competitive advantages. But here, you set it all aside. You question every assumption. Challenge every "that's just how it works." You get comfortable being wrong. You actively seek perspectives that contradict everything you think you know.

This is the only way to see what's actually possible.

Then, and this is critical, you intentionally add constraints back in to your strategy and plan for your company. Different ones. Purposeful ones. Moral ones.

You can decide to:

• Build a web we can trust.
• Put people in control of their digital lives.
• Privacy by design.
• Interoperability over lock-in.

These aren't just abstract things that I am ranting about, it is real things people are doing in W3 working groups. It's what drew me to the Web of Things (WoT) working group.

What is Web of Things?

Web of Things standardizes how IoT devices describe themselves. Each device publishes a “Thing Description” that lists its actions, events, and properties in a consistent format.

For example, a smart light has properties (on/off status, brightness level), actions (turn on, turn off, set brightness), and events (manual override detected). Most vendors use proprietary APIs, but by describing them using Thing Descriptions, any system can read the description and instantly understand how to control that light without custom code.

What I Built at TPAC

At Plugfest 2025, I built a Thing Description for a smart security camera that has a proprietary API. Once the Thing Description existed, other developers in the room could immediately trigger the camera’s audible alerts system, activate alarm lights, and adjust brightness.

You can see that live here, click to play:

​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au3ZL-GonOo​

Additional things colleagues demonstrated were a device discovery system that automatically integrates any IoT device on a network. Even competitors' devices, devices not designed for their system but welcome on their platform. Others built an open marketplace where manufacturers can publish Thing Descriptions for universal access.And we collaborated on solving TLS certificate handling for local network security, addressing how devices can communicate securely without relying on external certificate authorities. Finally, we're providing an open source WebSocket binding that any WoT users can utilize to speak to things that speak WebSockets.

In closing, I ask you this:

• What unconscious constraints are you carrying?
• What intentional constraints am I avoiding because they’re inconvenient?

These are the questions that determine whether we're building something worth building.

—Brian McManus

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