The year is 2022. We are amidst a new revolution of the World Wide Web and the Internet, which brings countless new opportunities to innovate and countless new areas to explore. During the past year or two, there has been a bombardment of new “Web3” start-ups; from no-loss lotteries like PoolTogether, to NFT games like Axie Infinity where you can make money by just playing, to a conceptualised, new and decentralised Internet where the users truly own their data. How did we get here, and where are we going? To answer this question, we must first travel back in time to the Web 1.0 revolution of the 1990s.

 

Web 1.0 brought the first ever websites to every-day consumers. It was when people started hearing about this exciting new piece of technology called the “Internet”, and where scepticism gradually turned towards acceptance and eventually reliance. The 1990s marked the birth of many new Internet start-ups; some may be familiar to you – Amazon, Google, Netflix – the tech giants today, while others perhaps less familiar, like AltaVista, Netscape and Yahoo, though still the rulers of their days. Most Web 1.0 websites consisted of static pages hosted on ISP-run web servers, with minimum personalised experience or interaction between users. The servers were usually just regular computers from regular users, as cloud computing didn’t become popular until in a decade’s time. The website files, written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), are served from the server’s files system.

 

In addition, two important concepts – URL and HTTP – are invented; URL is what you enter into your browser to specify the unique address pointing towards each resource on the Internet, and HTTP is a web protocol which allows for requests and retrieval of linked resources across the web. In essence, Web 1.0 is a giant library of data sourced together on a screen from computers all across the network for users to browse by clicking around linked text and images. This web version was made specifically for people searching for data, while lacking the necessary forms, visuals, controls, and interactivity we enjoy on today’s Internet; this is why Web 1.0 is often referred to as the read-only web. A classic Web 1.0 company is Wikipedia, which started as a read-only online encyclopaedia which lets users view information.

 

One individual in particular comes to mind when we speak of the second revolution of the World Wide Web, which continues even to this day. A College dropout and the youngest billionaire in the world, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004 and saw the rising of Web 2.0. The ethos of Web 2.0 is to create a more personalised user experience. Social media websites and applications like Facebook, MySpace and Friendster became more and more popular, as users turned from reading articles online to interacting and chatting with their friends. Moreover, websites began to follow the “mobile-first” design principle, where they placed more emphasis on the user experience on mobile devices than on computers; this is because users tend to spend much more time on their phones than on computers. Websites eventually evolved into apps which have notifications, in order to keep us always connected and locked in our social media circle.

 

Many websites, especially social media platforms, also became free to use. This led to the famous quote “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”. Instead of driven by revenue and profit, the market cap of a company was often defined by the number of users which it has, and the trajectory of this growth and expansion; the longer users spend on a platform, the more addicted they become, and thus enabling the company to utilise methods of monetisation more effectively, such as through running advertisement and providing a freemium service. We pay the price not in dollars but in personal data and content to be mined, sold and fed back into secret algorithms that hijack our attention so we'd give more. A company like Google runs billions of ad auctions per day, sharing the data of millions of people and receiving millions of dollars in return. It is reported that Google makes $400 million dollars per day in revenue from user data, and around $92 million in profit.

 

The Internet was now centralised and “owned” by Big Tech. Alongside the market of data auctions, Web 2.0 saw the rise of cloud computing. Amazon, Google and Microsoft make it cheap to build on the web; instead of having to acquire and maintain expensive infrastructure and servers, you can now rent a virtual machine from one of their vast data centres around the world. Today, close to 90% of all websites on the Internet is hosted by the four cloud computing providers, the biggest of which is AWS (Amazon Web Services). AWS is the backbone of a third of the web, including some big names such as Netflix, Twitter, and Facebook.

 

To address the market dominance and oligarchy imposed by Big Tech on the Web 2.0 version of our Internet, Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, came up with a new design for the Internet in as early as 2014, referring to it as a “decentralised online ecosystem based on blockchain”. However, this idea did not really become popular until last year. In Web 3.0, or simply Web3, the internet will supposedly become more democratised as opposed to being monopolised by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta (Facebook). Essential to this decentralisation is blockchain technology, which is a distributed database where encrypted blocks of digital asset data are stored and chained together; blockchain makes it possible for anyone, anywhere to access publicly visible and verifiable ledgers of record, while providing the ledgers with such security that it is almost impossible to hack them.

 

The blockchain already serves as the foundation for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and it is intricately woven into the vision of everything Web3 promises. Everything you do will be processed through the same secure procedures, with the decentralised system (as opposed to centralised Big Tech) building more privacy and transparency into all kinds of services, from social networking to online shopping. In a sense, Web3 is a hybrid of the two eras that came before it: the cutting-edge, dynamic, app-like technology of Web 2.0 combined with the user-driven, decentralised system that existed at the dawn of the internet, before trillion-dollar companies took control of everything. Web3 changes the balance of power away from the large tech companies and toward the users.

 

Along with cryptocurrencies, NFTs and the Web3 vision are also closely related. You've probably already heard of Non-Fungible Tokens, a method of giving a digital object permanent ownership. Recently, there has been a boom in popularity for NFT, which is primarily used for digital artwork, from music to sketching. blockchain serves as the foundation connecting cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and Web3. With an additional element of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Web3 can handle nearly any developing digital technology, from filtering out needless data to identifying security concerns.

 

It doesn't take long to find evidence that not everyone is convinced about Web3's promise. A major part of the scepticism comes from the accompanying environmental impact of the energy-intensive processing that some cryptocurrencies rely on. Currently, the Ethereum blockchain is using 33 terawatt hours of electricity; this is the same amount of power as the country of Serbia. The majority of electricity is still generated from powerplants which emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, contributing towards climate change which remains a huge problem in our current society. It’s also important to note that many of the Web 2.0 “villains”, such as Meta and Amazon, are already transitioning some of their business to Web3 in hopes of dominating the future.

 

While the amount of scepticism around Web3 may seem alarming, it is important to bear in mind that all new technologies tend to be faced with doubt and questions. The concept and design of Web3 may appear baffling to a newcomer, but the same could be said with understanding the Internet and getting online in the 1990s. Perhaps in a couple of decades’ time, Web3 will become the industry standard and thus render our current iteration of the Web obsolete. With some luck, maybe the next generation will be able to browse on an Internet free of the many problems of Web 2.0.