WHAT IS WEB 3.0?

The internet without any doubt is arguably the most important technology revolution in the history of humankind. Although the industry has evolved quite significantly since its inception, its current stage is similar to the auto industry in 1920 i-e it’s world-changing technology that has been around for almost 20 years but is still relatively immature and needs major improvements. Tim Berners-Lee wanted internet to be like a collaborative medium, where people could meet, read and write.” A system developed for scientists to share experiments was then soon dominated by portals like CompuServe, AOL, and Yahoo. All these online service providers were the gateway to Web 1.0. Individuals and governments began to use these services to consume and occasionally post content. In 1994, Netscape launched its web browser, prompting the dot-com explosion, initiating the browser wars. Web 2.0, unlike Web 1.0 brought us the “Web as platform,’ where software are built upon web instead of desktop,” according to Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle. This enabled a significant number of users to participate in content creation on social networks,sharing sites, blogs, and more. Social media and search engines driven mainly by user-generated content disrupted the media, advertising and retail industries. Consequently, mega companies in retail and publishing that refused to adapt died. Web 2.0’s business model was mainly driven by users’ freshly created content and profile data to be sold to third parties for the purpose of marketing. In fact, the internet has become a mega app store, dominated by centralized apps like Google, Facebook and Amazon. On these apps, everyone is making an effort to build an audience, collect and monetize data through targeted advertising. According to my opinion, Web 2.0’s business model is built on the centralization and exploitation of data, without users’ meaningful consent. So what is Web 3.0? Five years ago, the popular thought was that the next generation of the internet is going to be the Semantic Web. Berners-Lee used the term “Global Brain” to describe a web where machines would process content just like human i-e where all data would be understood properly both contextually and conceptually. The Semantic Web could not materialize for couple of reasons. The main reason was that the real AI technology, RDF (resource description framework), was almost impossible to implement. How can a machine differentiate a jaguar (the animal) and a Jaguar (the car)? The only way of differentiating is to understand the context in which it is being described. Despite IBM’s Watson spending billions, the technology i-e “connecting concepts and building taxonomies for every word” never truly came to fruition. In many ways, Web 3.0 is a return to Berners-Lee’s original web, which is “for posting anything, no permission is needed from a central authority. There is no such central controlling, ultimately no single point of failure and no “kill switch”! The rise of technologies like distributed ledgers and block chains will decentralized the data, creating a transparent and secure environment, and will eventually overtake Web 2.0’s centralization, and exploitative advertising. Decentralized infrastructure and application platforms will replace centralized tech mafias, and individuals will rightfully own their data. In fact, data ownership is one of the most important implications of decentralization and block chain technology. As Web 3.0 and the technologies that support it mature and become scalable, its original intent will be reflected in my opinion. Web 3.0 will also make possible transparent, peer-to-peer, opt-in communications enabling individuals to take ownership of their time. To conclude, Web 3.0 will bring individuals a fairer internet, enabling them to be a sovereign. True sovereignty is owning and having the control who profits from one’s time and information. This will be made possible by Web 3.0’s decentralized block chain protocol. It will enable us, the people to connect to an internet where we can own and where we will be properly compensated for our time and data, avoiding an exploitative and unjust web, where centralized repositories are the only ones that profit from it.