IS WEB3 THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET?

In the last year, the idea of Web3 has gained traction among technologists and business leaders as the next big thing. The latest iteration of the internet. Though there is no clear consensus on how Web3 should be defined, there is a broad agreement that the central concept of Web3 as a whole idea is decentralization based on blockchain technology. Its proponents herald it as a paradigm shift that could fundamentally change how the internet and internet-based businesses and internet economy work. It’s also linked to the concept of the metaverse which makes it even more alluring. In this blog, we will attempt to explore the idea and try to understand it.

Why is Web3 called Web3?

Web3 proponents see it as the evolutionary leap of the world wide web. The early web of the 1990s and early 2000s is referred to as Web 1.0, it was revolutionary but mainly involved static web pages and end-users were consumers of the content, producing content required setting up and hosting a website. Web 2.0, which started around 2004, brought with it a radical change allowing users to create and publish content using platforms such as social networks, blogs, wikis, etc. This empowered users to be creative and innovate but also led to large corporations controlling the internet, the data, the flow of content, and the digital economy. In recent years, there has been a push against this hegemony by users, small businesses, innovators etc. The increasing popularity of blockchain technology and decentralization has led to the reimagining of the internet as a truly decentralized internet or Web3.

It is pertinent to note here that though used interchangeably by some, Web3 is quite distinct from the term Web 3.0 coined years back by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The latter is also called Semantic Web as it envisioned a web with machine-readable language so data could be “understood” by machines based on the context or metadata provided. Some of the ideas are still part of it but the nascent Web3 is considerably different from the Semantic Web concept. Web3 seems in line with Berners-Lee’s vision of taking the web back from the control of big tech giants but blockchain technology remains at the core of the idea with backing from the crypto communities. In fact, the term Web3 was coined by Ethereum blockchain co-founder Gavin Wood.

The Core of Web3: Decentralization

Decentralization is a core concept of Web3 and a fundamental departure from its predecessors in terms of architecture and infrastructure. While Web 1.0 was all about static pages and Web 2.0 saw more dynamic and user-generated content and interactivity, the platform is provided by third parties and in most cases owned by tech giants such as Meta (formerly Facebook), Twitter, and Microsoft. However, in Web3, with blockchain technology, data can be stored in a distributed mechanism. In the blockchain, information is encrypted and stored over a network of computers with no central oversight. This means that data can’t be changed arbitrarily since its copies exist across the network, if a copy doesn’t match with the rest, it becomes invalid. This adds an extra layer of security which is built into the architecture.