Web3 as a vision seems to be the marketing point of all blockchain industry projects, but many people say that their projects will lead to Web3, but few people can clearly explain what Web3 is.
The first two eras of the Internet
In the first era of the Internet, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, all Internet services were built on open protocols and controlled by the community.
As a result, large Internet companies such as Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube emerged as the times require, while the influence of traditional centralized platforms such as “America Online” has been significantly reduced.
In the second era of the Internet, from the mid-2000s to the present, software and services built by for-profit technology companies (again, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon) have rapidly exceeded the capabilities of open protocols.
And the explosive growth of smartphones has accelerated this trend – users are migrating from open services to these more complex and focused mobile applications.
The good news is that billions of people have access to amazing technology for free.
The bad news is that centralized platforms control everything, and they will worry about startups and creators taking away their users and profits, thereby limiting latecomers from expanding their influence on the Internet.
This makes the internet less interesting and vibrant.
Web 3: The third era of the Internet
The response has been for governments to take the initiative to regulate large Internet companies, just as they once regulated traditional communications networks such as telephone, radio, and television.
But communication networks in the past were based on hardware, while the Internet was based on software. This is a fundamental difference.
Once a hardware-based network is built, it is almost impossible to rebuild it. However, software-based networks can be rebuilt through entrepreneurial innovation and market forces.
The Internet is the ultimate software-based network—a relatively simple core layer connected to billions of fully programmable computers at the edge. Computers connected to the Internet are free to run any software the user chooses, and software is the encoding of the human mind and can be anything dreamed up, so there is almost unlimited design space.
The Internet is still in its early stages: over the next few decades, core Internet services may be almost completely re-architected, and this will be enabled by blockchain.
Blockchain combines the best features of the two previous Internet eras: a community-governed decentralized network whose capabilities will eventually exceed those of state-of-the-art centralized services.
The next Internet era
Decentralized networks are not a panacea for all the problems on the internet, but they offer a better approach than centralized systems.
Take Twitter’s spam problem as an example:
Since Twitter closed their network to third-party developers, the only company dealing with Twitter spam is Twitter itself. By contrast, there are hundreds of companies trying to fight spam with billions of dollars in venture capital and corporate funding. But spam has not been effectively addressed.
But if the email protocol is decentralized, third-party developers can build businesses on top of it without worrying about Twitter changing the rules of the game and making the business cease to exist.
Blockchain is a powerful way to develop community-owned networks and level the playing field for third-party developers, creators, and businesses.
We saw the value of decentralized systems in the first era of the internet, and hopefully we’ll see it again next time.
A core insight of blockchain design is the addition of economic incentives. Cryptocurrencies are tokens built into a specific blockchain that provide a way to incentivize individuals and groups to participate in, maintain, and build services.
Internet services can also have the idea of tokens, but blockchain and cryptocurrencies can do something for cloud services.
It will take 20 years for open source software to replace proprietary software, and it may take just as long for open services to replace proprietary services.
But the benefits of this shift would be huge—we could trust community-owned and operated software instead of companies, changing the governing principles of the Internet from “don’t be evil” to “can’t be evil.”
The Internet’s past control over its most important services has gradually shifted from open source protocols maintained by nonprofit communities to proprietary services run by big tech companies.
But the movement emerging from the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency is building new internet services that combine the power of modern centralized services with the community-led spirit of the original internet, and we should embrace it.
