Web1 to Web3: There's nothing permanent about the Internet

I landed a job interview with a media house that had sensed an opportunity in those early dotcom days. I was called to the hallowed floor where senior executives sat in their wood paneled rooms. The executive with a booming cheerful voice asked me about the difference between the Internet and the newspaper. I said that the Internet was more interactive than a newspaper. That’s all I understood about the Internet at the time.

My answer was good enough to secure the job. I guess that was how the business world viewed the Internet in those pre-Google days. The promise of ‘interactive’ stuck, as brick-and-mortar businesses experimented with websites. We chatted on ICQ and AOL instant messengers and argued about the world on message boards. The Internet though excruciatingly slow, was refreshingly irreverent. It felt as though no big entity was in charge. Yet no one understood it as decentralized. There was no context of the monopolistic platform play yet.

Soon the dotcoms crashed after a lucrative ride, and social networks rose to eventually grow into digital behemoths. Once algorithms started to orchestrate our lives, those good old days of the decentralized Internet turned into childhood nostalgia.

The Internet was originally born out of a desire to share resources within DARPA, the research wing of the US Department of Defence. The early intention of the founding scientists was largely unselfish. Vint Serf the co-inventor of TCP/IP, the protocol that allows machines and applications to communicate over a network, has revealed that in the early days, people wanted to share information because they thought it may be useful for someone. But it was largely driven by technology and software experts, and most users had little to contribute.

The industry slowly transformed into Web 2.0. Ordinary netizens started to engage deeply and contribute content. Eventually, online resources started to gravitate towards a few influential platforms and the rest as we know is history. It didn’t take long for us to view the Internet as centralized and controlled, which set off the quest for the next iteration of the Internet. The industry started to look back at where it started, and in a sense return to the original idea of the decentralized web.

Today, the term Web3 is being touted as the new online paradise where netizens operate in a utopian democratic set-up. Blockchain technology provides the underlying fabric that works on consensus, while non-fungible tokens drive the online economy.

Decentralized alternatives are slowly emerging for every major app. Most of them are based on the notion of peer-to-peer services. Decentralized storage services use unused storage on users’ computers. Diaspora is a decentralized social network project that is not owned by anyone and uses individually owned nodes. Similarly, Mastodon is a social network made up of servers operated by individuals and organizations.

There is a lot of fuzziness surrounding Web3, such as resolving the complex problem of digital identity. The concept of verifiable decentralized identifier (DID) has emerged, which is not controlled by any digital overlord. DIDs are considered self-sovereign because users have control over their unique identifier.