The Future of the Internet

Nothing stays the same for long.

We accept the internet as such a fact of life now, it’s easy to forget it didn’t exist at all not that long ago. The public internet as we know it went live in 1991, and wasn’t widely used until the 2000s.

If you’re 30 or older, you can remember a world where the internet was mocked, derided, called a fad, etc. The idea of shopping from your bedroom, working remotely, video conferencing, ordering an Uber on your phone, or getting directions on your phone were considered ridiculous or science fiction. Now, they seem almost quaint. We don’t feel like we’re living in the future, it’s just how things work now. Yet, when the people developing the next wave of technology speak, it’s often ignored, derided, or seen as so far into the future that it isn’t even worth talking about.

People tend to mock things they don’t understand, and the narrative from many towards crypto and Web 3.0 is no different. If you don’t remember the many narratives against the Web in the 1990s, allow me to refresh your memory. This kind of article was commonplace, as was the fear mongering about hackers, criminals, and creepers online. A certain Nobel Prize winning economist even famously said in 1998 that “the internet’s impact on the economy will be no greater than of the fax machine’s.” That Nobel Prize winning economist is equally critical of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology today, often deriding Bitcoin as the placeholder for all of cryptocurrency, even after a decade of being proven wrong on the subject. A great marker for someone who “just doesn’t get it” is someone who is constantly talking about or criticizing Bitcoin. You don’t have to like or believe in Bitcoin at all to see Web 3.0 frankly, and there are plenty of things a reasonable person could criticize about Bitcoin… but if someone can’t see past Wave 1, and thinks the crypto space is “mainly just about Bitcoin”… they just don’t get it. They were the folks still debating email vs fax machines in 1995 while the internet, the single most important piece of technology that humanity had ever created, was being built.

Applying that to today: I encourage you to step outside of the dogma, both for and against crypto, and look at the technology for yourself. The core ethos of all of crypto is transparency and trust. There is nothing to hide here.

So what is Web 3.0?

There is some debate on what exactly this means, as it is still being built, its final form is unclear, and history has yet to provide us with an “official” definition. However, we have a general idea of what it is likely going to be, and we know it will almost certainly be based on blockchain technology.

To better understand this, let’s break down the Three Eras of the Internet.

Web 1.0

Web 1.0 is the first stage of the Internet’s evolution. This is back when everyone called it the “world wide web”, if you’re old enough to remember that 😉 Web 1.0 runs from 1991 to the early/mid 2000s.

This era was dominated by static web pages, without much interaction, and the end users (i.e. you and me) were primarily consumers, rather than creators. You can think of this like a “read-only” web for most people. No streaming video, no social media (ah, this part was nice…), etc. You got your news, maybe found a phone number, sent a few emails, and not much more.

In short, it was a pretty boring place, and you were primarily just a visitor in someone else’s world.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 brings us into the current internet we know today. It’s worth noting that what we accept it as the “modern” internet today, it is really only the second iteration of this technology. Web 2.0 is often considered as beginning with the creation of YouTube in 2005, and it continues through how most of the world operates today.

Web 2.0 brings with it the bright and interactive internet that we love. It gave us highly interactive web pages, YouTube, social media, and it let the masses become creators in countless different ways. It led to the rise of companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and many more, who owned the platforms people were using.

This era brought phenomenal gifts and opportunities to billions around the globe, but it also came with costs. Who got really rich off this wave? Who actually benefitted the most from this explosion of human creativity? Well… if you haven’t looked at the S&P 500 lately, it’s the Web 2.0 companies that people are creating, publishing, and transacting through. If you were a shareholder, you got rich, but if you were a user (i.e. one of the people actually making the company successful), you got nothing. In fact, some of these companies took things a step further and made the very users on their platforms, and their personal data, a product to sell to other companies. (Almost destroying democracy in the process)

This led to a massive centralization of power in a handful of companies, to a degree that the world has never seen before. Several of these companies have revenue exceeding most countries GDP, more personal information about their users than any entity should, more power than many governments, and some even effectively fund their own private space programs (ahem…). All with effectively no real oversight or accountability.

In short, it may be an exciting and vibrant world, but you own none of it, and you have no real say in it. You are merely a product in their world, you have no real vote in what happens, and everything you do makes someone else richer.

Web 3.0

That brings us to today, and the young but very rapidly evolving world of Web 3.0. You’ll hear the specifics be debated, but the general idea is for the pendulum to swing back against the centralization and abuses of power that have happened during Web 2.0. And, with blockchain’s ability to push power to the edges, ensure transparency, immutability, and decentralization… there is finally a way to actually make that happen.

The crypto world is always talking about financial use cases and decentralized banking first, since those are the easiest and most straightforward to understand. With only a moderate amount of knowledge in the space, it’s easy to see use cases like removing expensive payment services, remittance fees, banks, centralized lending, other financial services, etc. Most of these a pretty obvious and get plenty of airtime, and honestly… you can already do a ton of that today already. So, let’s pick a more ambitious example that’s a little less obvious.

For example: Since YouTube really kicked off Web 2.0, and most of us cannot even imagine a world without it, let’s use it as an example. When creators upload content to YouTube, they are completely at the mercy of the platform. YouTube captures most of the value from the views of the videos, puts advertisements on top of it, and can completely ban or shut off someone’s account if they choose. They can unilaterally make whatever changes they want to everyone’s experience with creators only “vote” being to leave and run their business elsewhere. Talk to anyone who has run a substantial part of their business through YouTube, ask them about the first time they had an actual problem… that’s the moment when you realize how powerless we all are against them. Remember years ago when YouTube turned off “auto-notify” and made users manually click the notification bell to receive notifications? Remember when they reduced payouts to creators? Or when they did that again? Or again?

The content creators on YouTube sure as hell do. In the meantime, have you looked at Google’s earnings lately (YouTube’s parent company)? They are astronomical. Yet, the content creators have no say in what happens to them. Now, imagine a system built on ideas similar to Bitcoin or Ethereum, a sort of decentralized YouTube (something multiple projects are actively building towards right now).

Say you had a decentralized network that allowed you to host your own videos just like YouTube. End users could have the exact same experience as Youtube today. But, on the backend, rather than all the money going to some other company’s bottom line, that money stayed in the community, and paid the people running the network? If that’s unclear, picture “Bitcoin miners”, but instead of competing to solve a puzzle and wasting all that energy, they were hosting videos for users in exchange for payment. Then, imagine if by owning that crypto’s “coin”, you owned a share in that network, you were entitled to fees paid in the network, and you were able to vote on what happened in the network. Which platform do you think users and creators would prefer using? Which economic model do you think is more sustainable in the long term? The model where users get to share in the rewards is a pretty easy win. It also turns out, that this kind of decentralized model, organized and orchestrated with some kind of coin or token, is applicable to a truly phenomenal number of internet businesses and services.

So, with the Web 3.0 model, you’re no longer just a “user” of the network… You’re an owner. That is the essence of Web 3.0. You own your data, you own part of the networks you interact with, you get to financially benefit from the economic activity you’re helping drive, you have a vote in what happens, and you are no longer simply a pawn in someone else’s world.

You get the same treatment regardless of your gender, race, origin, orientation, location, or status in the world.

Whether you’re Bill Gates or a kid growing up in a developing nation, you can use the same system, get the same treatment, and benefit from creating and participating in the same network.

Now that is truly a better world. 😊

Side note: If you’re interested in reading some other perspectives on Web 3.0, I’d recommend checking out comments from Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon or this interview with Packy McCormick.