The Internet is broke Web3.0 is coming...

Web 1.0 wasn’t given its name until it bit the dust. The ‘World Wide Web’ as it was known, was just a set of static websites with a load of information and no interactive content. Connecting meant dialing up through rickety modems and blocking anyone in the house from using the phone. It was the web of AOL chat rooms and MSN messenger, of AltaVista and Ask Jeeves. It was maddeningly slow. Streaming videos and music? Forget it. Downloading a song would take at least a day.

Then there was 2.0 The memory of bleepy modems and boring interfaces has largely floated away. Faster internet speeds paved the way for interactive content, the web wasn’t about observing anymore, it was about participating. The global sharing of information spawned the age of ‘Social Media’. Youtube, Wikipedia, Flickr and Facebook gave voices to the voiceless and a means for like-minded communities to thrive.

What's wrong then? The UN estimated internet users increased from 738 million to 3.2 billion from 2000–2015. That’s an unfathomable amount of data floating around, and as big digital corporations realized, personal information is an enormously valuable asset. So began the mass stockpiling of data in centralized servers, with Amazon, Facebook and Twitter the biggest custodians. People sacrificed security for the convenience of these services; whether they knew it or not, their identities, browsing habits, searches and online shopping information was sold to the highest bidder.

The internet today is broken by design. We see wealth, power and influence placed in the hands of the greedy, the megalomaniacs, or the plain malicious. Markets, institutions, and trust relationships have been transposed to this new platform, with the density, power and incumbents changed, but with the same old dynamics.

Take how we pay for things online. On Web 2.0, you are not empowered to make payments per se. In reality, you must contact your financial institution to do it on your behalf. You are not trusted to do something as innocuous as pay your water bill. You are treated like a child appealing to a parent. If you wish to contact your friend online, then likely you will need to appeal to Facebook to relay your message.

Most of us don’t fear government or corporate intrusion on our lives, but there are well-documented case where their interests are not aligned with our own. Look at Wikileaks. In 2010, a broadly respected set of journalists that publishes information generally in the public interest was targeted and cut off by major financial institutions like PayPal and Visa without any legal grounds. If you wanted to give a perfectly legal charitable donation to Wikileaks, you effectively couldn’t.

The Web3.0 revolution

The next web, they envisaged, would take nostalgic turn to the vision of the web 1.0: more ‘human’ and more privacy. Rather than concentrating the power (and data) in the hands of huge behemoths with questionable motives, it would be returned the rightful owners.

The vision of a fairer and more transparent web dates back to around 2006, but the tools and technologies weren’t available for it to materialize. Bitcoin was still three years off, bringing with it the notion of a distributed ledger, or blockchain, for peer-to-peer digital storage. Decentralization was the idea; blockchain was the means. Now we have what is described as human-centered internet.

Web 3.0 is an inclusive set of protocols to provide building blocks for application makers. These building blocks take the place of traditional web technologies like HTTP, AJAX and MySQL, but present a whole new way of creating applications. These technologies give the user strong and verifiable guarantees about the information they are receiving, what information they are giving away, and what they are paying and what they are receiving in return. By empowering users to act for themselves within low-barrier markets, we can ensure censorship and monopolization have fewer places to hide. Consider Web 3.0 to be an executable Magna Carta — “the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”

If society does not adopt the principles of Web 3.0 for its digital platform, it runs the risk of continued corruption and eventual failure, just as medieval feudal systems and Soviet-style communism proved untenable in a world of modern democracies.

Web 3.0 will engender a new global digital economy, creating new business models and markets to go with them, busting platform monopolies like Google and Facebook, and giving rise to vast levels of bottom-up innovation. Cheap government attacks on our privacy and liberty like widespread data trawling, censorship and propaganda, will become more difficult.

As of now all we can say is the revolution to democratizing web has already begun. Have a look-