What is Web 3.0?

Tired of hearing buzz words like web3.0 this and web3.0 that? What the heck is web3.0? To understand what most technologists call web3.0, you must understand what were web 1.0 and web 2.0.

Those who are close to my age, may recall the first browsers -- even before Netscape? Remember Mosaic? ?At that time, back in 1994, we used to create static html pages with html1.0. The pages were read-only, non-interactive and hence served a one-way information sharing purpose only. ?That was web1.0 – characterized by a 1-way dissemination of information. Back in 1994, I started to run a page on "self-stabilizing distributed systems". ?I was in graduate school then, and as a graduate student, I published some research in that field and got to know the small community of researchers interested in that topic. To share latest papers in the topic, I created the page. ?On that page, there was no way for others to write a comment on any articles I posted. ?There was no facility for visitors to upload their own article and get it listed in the list of papers. They had to send me their pdf files via email or via ftp, and I had to change the html in the backend to have them listed. ?Also, in Web1.0, initially, there was no user authentication in those days. In the subsequent years, came e-commerce entities -- first one I recall ?was a Massachusetts based book seller called bookpool. ?My brother then alerted me first to bookpool and then to Amazon which was only a book seller in the beginning. ?With E-commerce came a few new features such as the buyers needed to add their addresses, choose books they wanted to purchase, and add their payment information such as credit card details. Additionally, for returning buyers, the need for authentication led to very simple authentication scheme which allowed one to authenticate to only one site at a time. As credit card information was sensitive, Netscape also came up with SSL so that the credit card information does not go through the Internet unencrypted for eavesdroppers ?to copy and use. Digital Certificates also came up around the same time to authenticate the sites. Soon after, social media -- precursors to Facebook started coming including curated AoL groups, yahoo groups, Myspace etc. ?The users started creating written content initially, and then multi-media content. ?The users were allowed to create pages without knowing html, and users were allowed to authenticate themselves, set visibility of their content etc. That was Web2.0 – the interactive web.

Both the web1.0 and 2.0 were based on client-server architecture. All the contents from the web page creators or users of the pages were uploaded to server farms of companies such as Yahoo, Myspace, Google, Facebook, and such. ?All interactions among users or from user to the page were mediated through those servers. The content created by millions of people were owned by a few social media companies. They were free to use the data or content in whatever way they want. Some limited monetization of user content was made possible through sharing minuscule fraction of advertisement revenue by some of these companies.

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In the year 2016, the first big scandal broke when a company named Cambridge Analytica was found to have used immense number of Facebook users' data and activities and sell that data to third parties who used the data in election interference in the US. The question of privacy, and data protection came up in a big way. The other issue that started coming up is that the tech giants like Facebook or Google were noticed to have been collecting immense amounts of data on users including when the users are not using their products, just by listening on the microphones on the devices on which their products were installed. These companies made immense revenue just based on contents and data of users -- which naturally made a lot of people angry and concerned. So, the idea started gaining attention that ?the content created by a user should be retained at a location and storage decided by the user, and when a social media page wants to display such contents either by the creators of the page or on the request of the users of that page, the content needs to be fetched dynamically from the location where the owner of the content keeps it. Naturally, content owner may also want to monetize some of this content. So, the possibility that automated credit in the owners account based on the usage of her content came up. This is the fundamental tenet of Web 3.0.

So, a decentralized content provision system with peer-to-peer monetization of usage of content are supposed to be the significant features of Web 3.0.

While the concept of Web3.0 started gaining currency, the crypto promoters swooned in with ulterior motive to rationalize and legalize cryptocurrencies. These crypto promoters have been trying to take over the narrative of the 3rd generation web technologies by conflating the concept of Web 3.0 with crypto. ?However, ?there is no technological imperative to relate the two except some people trying to hijack a technology concept for currying favour to? their individualistic goals.

Web 3.0 technology can very well be built on decentralized system of servers which are capable of peer-to-peer communication – like Napster, which was created way before its time, or bittorrent like systems. Distributed Hash Table can be utilized to index content. For payment one can easily use digital payment rails including CBDC or UPI or Pix.

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Even if you want to tokenize the contents as NFT, you could do that through IPFS based content storage, and a centralized program that maintains the token lifecycle. You can also create a system with permissioned ledger to run the contracts on the token life cycle.

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While one could very well use a permissionless DLT for doing a lot of these, that is an implementation choice – and matter of preference. Web 3.0 is not in anyway fundamentally connected to crypto or DLT – it may be implemented using DLT and enabling content payment system with crypto but not necessarily so.

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In summary, Web3.0 is a technology on its own – it has no reason to be implemented with cryptocurrency-based payment system or tokenization on public blockchain. One could surely do that – but one could also use alternative ways to enable Web3.0.