The Semantic Web when it arrives will be fully federated like the Web we have now.
The web we have now is not 100% federated. Our access and ability to publish on the web is controlled by a few large companies with some regulation by the government. Even if the Semantic Web takes off, I can't imagine that most people will be consuming that data autonomously. On the contrary, there will likely only be a few significant players be they browser producers or otherwise converting that information to be relevant to users, thus it won't really be the federated utopia so often espoused by the Semantic Web pundits. But hey, maybe I'm a pessimist. It's not to say we shouldn't care about privacy and about how big conglomerates with their own agendas use the data we give them, it's just that it's naive to think that there is some purely free form of the web yet to be discovered.
The web we have now is not 100% federated. Our access and ability to publish on the web is controlled by a few large companies with some regulation by the government. Even if the Semantic Web takes off, I can't imagine that most people will be consuming that data autonomously. On the contrary, there will likely only be a few significant players be they browser producers or otherwise converting that information to be relevant to users, thus it won't really be the federated utopia so often espoused by the Semantic Web pundits. But hey, maybe I'm a pessimist. It's not to say we shouldn't care about privacy and about how big conglomerates with their own agendas use the data we give them, it's just that it's naive to think that there is some purely free form of the web yet to be discovered.