Whether the company is a news outlet like NBC or CNN, or a well-known brand like McDonald’s, every company quickly builds a website that conveys information to the public. A website is an entity created and owned by an enterprise. It mainly provides static data, and its data is controlled and managed by the enterprise, while information flows outward to website users.
Web 1.0: The Static Internet
The first iteration of the public internet was the website era. At that time, almost every company needed to build a portal, and its website mainly contained static data and information they considered important. Corporate websites contain information about the company, mainly marketing and promotional materials, while news and reference type websites also publish a large amount of information. But all of these sites push information toward consumers—it’s a one-way communication path. This was similar to the way traditional media at the time (newspapers, magazines, radio, television) disseminated information to the public.
Whether the company is a news outlet like NBC or CNN, or a well-known brand like McDonald’s, every company quickly builds a website that conveys information to the public. In this static Internet, the website is an entity created and owned by the enterprise. It mainly provides static data, and its data is controlled and managed by the public enterprise, while the information flows outward to website users.
In this model, data personalization is very limited given the one-way nature of the information. Users can select and filter the information they want to consume, but they often have little ability to influence what the information conveyed contains. Users also have little ability to influence other users, and information sharing between users is often limited to local friends or bulletin boards. These are often very focused and limited audiences.
Web 2.0: Web Applications
The second iteration of the public Internet, which is the Internet people use now, was the era of web applications. Here, businesses focus on providing forums for individual users to share information with each other. Web 2.0 ushered in the craze for creating personal blogs, which later expanded into today’s social media world.
Companies like Twitter and Facebook are leading the way in democratizing data. The app they created allows anyone to post any content on any topic and share it with a potentially large audience. The current iteration of the Internet is shown in Figure 2. Web applications and social networks owned by companies like Facebook provide forums for users to enter data into the applications and share it privately with “friends” or anyone else who may be interested. Today’s web applications enable people to communicate with people they have never met, spread across the world.
When smartphones became ubiquitous, Internet usage grew dramatically. Nowadays everyone has access to the internet all the time. They can talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere, no matter where they are. As a result, the capacity of the Internet has exploded.
While users discovered that they could communicate with people around the world, the companies that owned these apps discovered that they could collect a wealth of information about users and their likes and dislikes. This data becomes a valuable source of information and a major source of revenue for Internet giants. Companies like Facebook grew into multi-billion dollar global giants, and their founders became some of the richest people in the world.
Rather than relaying information from one user to others, these companies have found other things they can do to use the information they gather about people’s likes and dislikes to tailor them to their interests. The “social algorithm” was thus born, and web application companies exerted enormous power in influencing the information received by people around the world.
This control of information makes these companies very powerful, and many people believe that they are very powerful.
Web 3.0: Authoritative Data
We are now on the cusp of the third iteration of the public internet.
In Web 3.0, web applications no longer store and maintain data. Instead, data and information are stored within the fabric of the Internet itself. There is data in Web 3.0 that is available to any application that needs access and has the right to use it. This data is no longer owned by the application or controlled by web platform companies like Facebook. In fact, Web applications play an important role in information management. No single app can act as a curator of information, and therefore no powerful social media company can influence what information people can see.
Figure 3 shows such an Internet. End users directly manage and control their data and information, and the use and management of this data is not controlled by a single company. Web applications are consumers of information, but none of them own or manage the information. Therefore, web applications are now more important than the data itself. Data and information are stored in a distributed blockchain and are not managed by any one company. All information in the blockchain is evenly distributed across all Internet companies and cannot be controlled by any central organization (government or company).
The goal is to make shared, uncensored, uncertified, authoritative information independent of web applications and their undue influence on information. This information is owned and managed by the real owner of the data (i.e. the user), not by the web application and its creators.
The result will be a more authoritative and trustworthy Internet because data will be traceable, referenceable and uncensored. And Web 3.0 should create a more decentralized power structure on the Internet than the network platform companies of Web 2.0.
