Introduction

The internet is the world’s most popular computer network that began as an academic research project in 1969 and became a global commercial network in the 1990s. Today it is used by more than 4.7 billion people around the world and has intertwined ever more deeply with our daily lives. Most people access internet content using a (worldwide) web browser like Chrome and Safari. Indeed, the web has become so popular that many people incorrectly treat the internet and the web as synonymous. But in reality, the web is just one of the many internet applications built on the internet. Other popular internet applications include email, BitTorrent, video games, chat or voice communication, and several others.

One can think of the internet as the roads that connect villages, towns, and cities together. The web contains the things you see on the roads like houses, buildings, and shops. And the vehicles are the data moving around — some go-between websites and others will be transferring your emails or files (audio/video/plain text) across the internet, separately from the web.

The internet was rooted in the idea of decentralization, where no one owns the internet or controls who can connect to it. Instead, thousands of different organizations operate their own networks and negotiate voluntary interconnection agreements. However, the complex and often invisible ecosystem of technologies, protocols, and networks that allows the internet to function is in a constant state of flux.

Today the vast majority of internet traffic is controlled by a handful of companies, akin to tollbooths on the roads. Currently, there are only a few web hosting and server companies tasked with the responsibility of providing internet connection, a development that has significantly eroded the decentralization aspect of internet connection as been the case in the early years. And your movement around the web is constantly monitored and directed to and from by a handful of tech giants.

Using the web now means being forced to trust centralized mediators with our digital lives, exposing ourselves to data manipulation, censorship, fraud, and surveillance. An internet where we’re forced to place blind trust in middlemen, gatekeepers, rent-seeking platform monopolies, and data silos is a fundamentally broken internet. The digital systems we depend on should not require us to trust others to protect our most sensitive data from theft and abuse. And Web 3.0 is a bold vision to break this cycle of centralization.

Building Blocks of the Internet

It is important to note that there is a centralized point in an otherwise decentralized Internet network, which can be a server through which all data in a network must pass through, before distribution to various computers or devices.

In the early days, the Internet operated as a standalone network that connected different groups of people and organizations. The fact that such networks’ control was limited to certain groups of people allowed for internet decentralization. That is no longer the case as demand for internet connection has ballooned to levels that earlier decentralized networks would struggle to offer support.

The infrastructure for the internet as we know it is built on three critical blocks:

• The backbone (or the bottom block): This consists of long-distance networks — mostly on fiber-optic cables — that carry data between data centers and consumers. The backbone market is highly competitive. Backbone providers frequently connect their networks together at internet exchange points, usually located in major cities. Establishing a presence at IEPs makes it much easier for backbone providers to improve their connections to others.
• Data centers (or the middle block): These are rooms full of servers that store user data and host online apps and content. Some are owned by large companies such as Google and Facebook. Others are commercial facilities that provide service to many smaller websites. Data centers have very fast internet connections, allowing them to serve many users simultaneously. Data centers can be located anywhere in the world, but they are often located in remote areas where land and electricity are cheap. For example, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have all constructed vast data centers in Iowa.
• The last mile (or the top block): This is the part of the internet that connects homes and small businesses to the internet. Currently, about 70% of residential internet connections in the United States are provided by cable TV companies such as Comcast and Time Warner. Of the remaining 30%, a growing fraction uses new fiber optic cables, most of which are part of Verizon’s FiOS program, AT&T’s U-Verse, or Frontier. Finally, a shrinking number use outdated DSL service provided over telephone cables. The last mile also includes the towers that allow people to access the internet with their cell phones. And wireless internet service accounts for a large and growing share of all internet usage.

As you might realize, the earlier state whereby information passed through a central point, i.e., server, still exists. However, unlike in the past, nowadays there are smaller networks inside bigger networks. The smaller networks can be groups of people or corporations working on unique data sets.

This hoarding of unique data sets via centralized server (farms) in control of these corporations is what’s calling for (re)-decentralization of the internet, or the rise of Web 3.0.

Web 1.0 -→ Web 2.0

It shouldn’t be surprising that just like cities evolving, it’s the buildings, houses, and shops that are torn down, reimagined, re-engineered, and re-built. But the roads cutting through them may require routine upkeep and maintenance, but we don’t typically tear it all down, and rebuild it.

Similarly, since the British scientist by the name of Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN introduced the world to the world wide web - simply known as, the web, it has had two phases of evolution.

• Web 1.0: The first iteration of the web was mainly populated with static HTML web pages displaying non-interactive, centrally sourced data. As a result, the vast majority of web users were simple consumers of web content, and digital communications were largely limited to emails and basic one-way messaging applications. Despite these limitations, after launching in the 1990s, Web 1.0 rapidly revolutionized the way people connect and exchange information and introduced a new digital world with which humanity has been captivated ever since.

• Web 2.0: Coined by Tim O’Reilly and others between 1999 and 2004, the original internet gradually evolved into the more interactive, digital landscape we frequent today. This stage of the internet’s development, Web 2.0, enabled the facilitation of more engaging and social online experiences and gave rise to new business models enabled by network effects, crowdsourced content, and multidirectional data flows. In short, while Web 1.0 enabled data to be more effectively presented and consumed by users, Web 2.0 opened the floodgates to a more personalized internet via multi-channel user interactions and more dynamic, responsive algorithms. And the scalability of Web 2.0 was accelerated by three catalysts:

  • Mobile: With the launch of the iPhone in 2007, we moved from dialing up to the internet a few hours a day at home at our desktops to an “always connected” state — the web browser, mobile apps, and personal notifications were now in everyone’s pocket.
  • Social networks: Coaxed users into good behavior and content generation including recommendations and referrals. From Instagram, persuading us to share photos online for anyone to see; to entrusting unknown travelers with our homes on AirBnB; and even getting into a stranger’s car with Uber.
  • Cloud: Helped commoditize the production and maintenance of internet pages and applications. Millions of entrepreneurial experiments could benefit from low-cost resources that scaled as their businesses grew.

Now, Web 3.0

And now we are ready for its third iteration. And yes, that includes building net new roads or protocols, not just the applications on top of it. Often when a revolutionary new technology is introduced, it takes time for its effects on society to unfold and for us to fully understand them. The early days of the information revolution were all about individual empowerment, open access to information, content creation, and peer-to-peer (p2p) collaboration. While some of the principles of Web 2.0’s catalysts will carry forward — a lot will need to be reimagined.

Clearly, the web and more specifically Web 2.0 has brought us undeniable benefits, but looking back we can also see a disturbing trend — the underlying infrastructure of the internet has led to a concentration of power that benefits the few at the expense of the many (and funny still, some may argue that’s capitalism at work). While the internet still is decentralized, the web as we know it has become highly centralized with just a handful of companies collecting rent from anyone trying to search, build, connect, move, or sell.

With concerns over internet privacy, data portability, and self-sovereign identity rapidly becoming mainstream issues, there has never been a more concerted effort to accelerate the next paradigm shift in internet applications. While the entirety of Web 3.0’s underlying architecture has yet to be established, there is a broad consensus on some of the general characteristics this new version of the internet will feature:

• Secure Data Ubiquity via Decentralized Networks: While Web 3.0 will harken a new era of interconnected Internet of Things (IoT) devices and multi-platform interoperability, the data stored and shared on this new web will also be more secure and flexibly applied than current web data. This will be made possible through Web 3.0’s decentralized network infrastructure (or blockchain technology), which helps eliminate non-value-adding middlemen, eliminate the risk of centralized server failures, and enable users to fully own their own data. Web 3.0 may also enable applications to be more device-agnostic, allowing different types of hardware and software platforms to interact with one another without any operational friction or added development costs.

• Semantic Web: As part of its underlying operational model, Web 3.0 is expected to be able to analyze and act on a broad ecosystem of digital content by forming complex associations between web services, user behavior, and other contextual data. This breakthrough will enable an unprecedented level of data connectivity and mark a significant departure from the current model, which focuses on keywords and structured numerical values. The goal of the Semantic Web in many ways is to make Internet data machine-readable, increasing its overall efficiency and effectiveness on a far-reaching scale.

• Artificial Intelligence: Web 3.0’s semantic web will be enabled by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) software capable of decrypting natural language and understanding user intention. As a result, the new internet is expected to provide more intuitive, user-centric interactions relative to the current internet, which is still largely reliant on direct user inputs. Today, we go search for our restaurant, or the music or flight tickets — but Web 3.0 will take a proactive approach to our needs and returns recommendation through our browsing patterns across the entire web, not hindered by ‘tollbooths’. These AI processes will also play a central role in maintaining the integrity of Web 3.0’s content ecosystem by separating reliable information from low-quality or fraudulent or fake posts.

• VIX (Visual Immersion Experience): Present-day technology already offers an impressive array of virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR)-enabled experiences. However, Web 3.0 is expected to expand the use of 3D graphics and VR technologies in a way that blurs the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds. With Web 3.0 enabling the rendering of physical objects in the digital realm and vice versa, this immersive technology will enable new ways to interact with products and services and display or retrieve information.

As such, Web 3.0 marks a new online paradigm that encapsulates a vast array of cutting-edge decentralized web applications, built around cutting-edge technologies such as AI, IoT devices, and VR/AR. These key innovations will be connected and enabled through Web 3.0, which provides the decentralized yet secure network infrastructure necessary to bring Web 3.0 to fruition.

Final Thoughts

The new web is not going to be something out of the blue. It will be the result of the constant push and testing of the boundaries by sheer human persistence. With a more personal and customized browsing experience a smarter and more human-like search assistant, and other decentralized benefits that are hoped will help to establish a more equitable web. The word equitable is of critical importance since that will empower each individual user to become a sovereign over their data and help create a richer overall experience as a result of converging technology innovations and pushing the rent-seekers to the curb.

Web 3.0 is inevitable. It may seem hard to fathom considering how human behavior has been fundamentally shifted via smart devices, smart nudges, and data-hungry platforms that will ingest your data, spit back ads, and make a profit at the expense of your attention. The new age of the internet will become exponentially more integrated into our daily lives.

We will see nearly all of today’s normally offline machines, from home appliances like ovens, vacuums, and refrigerators to all types of transport become part of the IoT economy, interacting with its autonomous servers and decentralized applications (DApps), advancing new digital realms like blockchain and digital asset to power a myriad of new tech “miracles” for the 21st century.