What is Web 3.0, and should you care?
Giles Walker
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4.25.22
Web 3.0 is a term I am sure a lot of you have heard and like myself thought ‘yeah, I totally know what that means….?’ Followed by a quick Google search to find sites that say too little or say too much and make you even more confused. I will start by giving a quick history of the internet, an analogy for Web 3.0 in terms of the electricity market and what the future may hold.
Web 1.0 or the early stage of the internet runs from roughly 1991 to 2004. The internet ‘officially’ started in 1991 with a computer programmer, Time Berners-Lee, who introduced the world wide web. This changed the internet from a file sharing network to a web of information that anyone can search to find information. The internet of this time is classified as a read only style of internet in that websites were not interactive, similar to reading a magazine, the information is there for you to consume but that’s all. At the end of the article are a couple examples of those wonderful 90's websites.
Web 2.0, the interactive internet we are currently in (2004 – present). This internet is known for the ability to interact back and forth. If we use Facebook as an early example (released 2004) people could put their pictures, thoughts and share information about places or things on Facebooks wall which is visible to friends and family, most importantly they could then respond to said information in the way of likes, shares and comments. In today’s age this seems basic but for 2004 it was ground-breaking.
Web 2.0 has expanded into our external lives too. If you go to a restaurant or a shop and have tracking enabled on your applications, then Google will know where you have been in the real world. They take this data along with everything you say and do, all the websites you Google, how long you spend on them, how much YouTube you watch and which content, what sort of files you are storing in your Google Drive and who email’s you through Gmail. This information is then bundled up and sold to advertisers for ‘targeted’ advertisements towards what you probably want to see, hear and most importantly buy. Web 2.0 at a high level is a centralised system where you are the product to a small handful of giant tech companies, and you have limited privacy.
Web 3.0 has no official definition and is more of a view of where things seem to be going and what new companies are trying to create, it is the evolution of Web 1 and 2. In a nutshell it is the change from a centralised system to a decentralised network where information is supplied to the individual through multiple AI models that review the information and give the true data to you (think fake news filtering), also called the semantic web, and individuals will retain sovereignty through the use of distributed ledger technology, Blockchain. There is much more to Web 3.0 but hopefully this helps understand the change that is happening.
What does this mean to you and business more generally? To help explain the fundamental difference the move to Web 3.0 will make I will explain it using an analogy on our current electricity system.
In the UK you have the main suppliers, think nuclear power plants/green energy etc, they provide the bulk of electricity to the country’s electricity grid. You have limited to no choice but to use these central providers. The Government has put regulations in place to help mitigate price spikes and further development of green energy and carbon reduction however we have limited choice but to use the electricity. This means if the network fails you are out of power and there is nothing you can do about it. If the energy company sends you an incorrect bill the onus is on you to prove its wrong and if you want to sell energy back into the grid you cannot dictate the price.
With advancements in technology things are changing and homes now have solar and other alternatives. Imagine if all the excess alternative energy you produce was stored and could be sold to whomever you wanted at agreed rates through automatic payment methods. There would be no need to discuss usage as a smart contract would be in place so people know the rate upfront, and an AI model knows how much they can have to have no effect on your needs. This is an example of what a decentralised electricity grid could look like, you own the product you make and can decide what you do with it, this is similar to what some of Web 3.0 could become.
If we change energy provider to YouTube you will hopefully see the similarities, you do not get to dictate the value of your work or how much you should be paid for views, you have zero control on how it gets found and if YouTube servers go down there is no backup of your files for people to find, you do have more choice, but YouTube is the best platform for video sharing at the moment. You create all the value and give it all to YouTube for a small potential return.
Instead of content creators placing all their work on to YouTubes platform and getting paid cents on the dollar and having limited control, in Web 3.0 creators would own their content and be paid directly for it on a value they deem appropriate or what the market dictates, this includes the second-hand market. The decentralised web with AI models creates a semantic layer to provide you the right info based on semantics and then allows you to interact with the creator directly. With smart contracts built in the underlying platform (Immutable X for example) value through the form of fungible and non-fungible tokens can be easily transferred between consumer and creator, essentially removing the need for the middleman who does not create the value, only the platform in which it is hosted.
Platform providers (Microsoft for example) of the future will not hold the keys to revenue and distribute it to creators for fractions of a cent, they will be the marketplace that allows creators and consumers to come together (like Lloyd’s of London). The fee to operate on this platform will be fractions of a cent to the provider with the bulk going to the creator, this is because the money to be made is in having billions of people use your platform as a marketplace to do business. Smart contracts will allow for this to happen automatically.
For those of you that remember Napster or uTorrent’s, this form of sharing files and data on a decentralised platform has similarities to Web 3.0. There was no central server that held the files, they were shared among thousands of computers in a decentralised network. Users searched for the info and then downloaded it to their PC which then added to the availability of that file on the system. Although both these systems were illegal as you were effectively stealing the files (copyrights etc), imagine if instead when you downloaded the file the content creator got a share of the sale automatically through a smart contract. This means if I buy a movie online, I could sell it to you and that sale results in fees going to the original creator without either of us having to do anything and it is all captured and logged through the blockchain.
To conclude, the trouble with Web 3.0 is it is difficult to define what it will be, and it is hard to explain as it is so fundamentally different to what we know today. For example, my grandmother who is ninety-seven has no idea what Netflix is, does not understand how video calls work and would have no idea how to send an email, whereas my five-year-old shows her nana how to get Netflix, Amazon or Disney working and knows how to do voice calls. To my five-year-old it is second nature, to my granny it is voodoo. Web 3.0 is coming and there are multiple new businesses that are paving the way for this new internet, in 20 years’ time will we look back at Facebook, YouTube, and laugh about how we used to do things back then just like we do when we see old 90’s websites?
