From ARPANET to WEB 3.0

Image by Geralt from Pixabay

Intro

If you’re not living under a rock by now you have probably heard about web 3.0. But what exactly does it mean? How did we get here? And what difference does it make? These are the questions I will try to answer in this article.

A brief history of The Internet

To get a full grasp of what web 3.0 means we first need to look at how it came to be.

Genesis

As with many great inventions, the necessity that gave birth to this innovation came from something not that great. In this case, we’re talking about the Cold War. The technological race of mega powers of the time led to many new advancements. Among those was ARPANET an experimental computer network that later evolved into the internet as we know it today.

Web 1.

After the creation of ARPANET more networks started to join the network. Thus arose a need for standardization. So that the computers in the networks could speak to each other. And TCP and IP protocols provided a solution for the problem. The World Wide Web was born. But back in the day, it was quite different than the internet we know today. The pages were static, meaning the users couldn’t interact with the pages. No comments, no likes, nothing like that. In other words Read-only. And becoming a content creator was also not easy because the content needed to be self-hosted and required a certain level of technical skills. It was a more decentralized version of the web than the one we know today. Without the big players like Google getting most of the traffic.

Web 2.0

The second iteration of the World Wide Web is the era of user-generated content, social networks, and advertisements. Web pages were no longer static. Users could now interact with them. The internet was no longer read-only, it was now read-write. And with this came the commercialization of the internet. The boom of online advertising. Companies quickly realized the commercial potential of the World Wide Web. Investments began to flow and the dot-com bubble happened. The commercial world started moving their business online. Tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook took off. And over time their influence has only grown. The more users these tech giants gained, the more influential they became. They became centralized hubs of massive amounts of user-generated content. For social media sites and search engines to be free for the users these services had to find another way to monetize. And they did so by advertising. This dynamic has created an attention economy. In other words, users pay for these services not with their money but with their attention.

Web 3.0

The revolution of the Internet. The idea of users taking back ownership of their content and changing the economic incentives online. Web 3.0 should be an open and decentralized version of the internet. Where enabled by the technology of blockchain users can freely exchange information for money and cut the middlemen out of the equation. This would bring users control of their data and how it is used. Users could freely choose to sell their data to advertisers or to prioritize their own privacy. Content creators could directly and frictionlessly monetize their work and split profits with co-authors automatically. Is this a dream of the future? The blockchain technology we have today already allows for these things to happen. Users can create decentralized apps (Dapps) and use their cryptocurrency wallets to interact with them. There are platforms like mirror.xyz that allow minting content as an NFT, auctioning it, and automatically splitting profits between co-authors. There are services like Brave browser which are moving towards this web 3.0 model by allowing its users to take ownership of their browsing data and choosing between getting an ad-free browsing experience or getting paid in cryptocurrency for ads. But although there are some (a lot more than mentioned above) examples of transitioning towards Web 3.0 model, the technology is still in its infancy. And it will take a while until we get a meaningful network effect that pushes us from the world of web 2.0 into a world of web 3.0.