Why tomorrow’s business leaders should know aboutWeb 3.0

Today we will plunge together into the heart of a new paradigm shift: the emergence of decentralized websites.

Will these incensurable sites embody the standard of interfaces in the future, or will they remain a niche dedicated to enthusiasts and activists?

What is a decentralized website?

Before getting to the heart of the matter, let’s take a look at what a decentralized site is and what the stakes are.

The principle of decentralization is eminently abstract. More than for other concepts, everyone has their own definition with variable criteria for judging whether a project or service is decentralized.

But in the context of the decentralized web, also known as Web 3.0, there is a general consensus on a few fundamentals. Thus, decentralization must at least allow a large autonomy concerning certain the usual actors within the installation of Internet sites.

In other words, a real decentralized site cannot be made to disappear by its host or be erased from the search engines because its domain name has been censored or repurchased.

These various criteria make it possible to establish a kind of standard profile of the decentralized website. However, these criteria do not necessarily all need to be present for there to be an effective decentralization. Drawing up a list is not necessarily the most relevant approach, but it has the advantage of offering a benchmark when looking at website decentralization.

There is however an essential foundation for the construction of a decentralised website : hosting and distribution should not be centralized in a single point but distributed as much as possible through a large number of network nodes.

If behind a website, distributed on different servers and using ENS, only one manager is operating and controlling the site’s content, can we still realistically talk about a decentralized site?

Why use decentralized websites?

If the deployment of a website is nowadays quite simple insofar as your host will facilitate most of the processes, the deployment of a decentralized website is a little more complicated.

What is the point of setting up a decentralized website when other services are simpler, less expensive, and allow a faster deployment?

We all know the reason… If these services are simpler and less expensive, they come with counterparts whose users have a variable awareness.

Indeed, the tendency to centralize Internet services such as encryption or hosting by huge companies such as Amazon or Microsoft may eventually harm the web in the form we know it. The data of many users pass through these servers whose conditions of use remain very opaque and under the jurisdiction of the United States. We are reaching a stage where there is no real alternative to these giants in terms of quality of services and costs. These de facto monopolies pose several ethical problems, particularly related to the use of these websites and their content.

Today, any websites can be censored, blocked or modified if its contents are not appropriate to the cultural or legal standards of certain countries (such as the USA). Worse, censorship may not be “simply” political but also economic. Indeed, some players have become so powerful that they can compromise the infrastructure (or the visibility, which amounts to the same thing) of any potential competitor which tries to compete by developing and using some of their services.

How to set up a decentralized website?

Setting up a decentralized website is no longer as complex as one might imagine. Indeed many services can simplify the process.

First of all, let’s take the hosting of these decentralized websites and how they save the data put online in a distributed way. These websites generally use decentralized protocols that offer similar or completely different services from what we are used to. Let’s look at some of the companies that allow the deployment of decentralized websites.

One of today’s decentralized sites’ cornerstones is the IPFS (or InterPlanetary File System), a distributed file management protocol.

According to some within the ecosystem, this standard is comparable to the HTTP standard and could be its future replacement. On the other hand, IPFS works differently - instead of communicating files to specific servers, it interacts with the network about the file in question.

IPFS thus embodies a completely different paradigm that allows us to more easily set up websites that no longer need to be hosted on a specific server but can be distributed through a network. IPFS is potentially an alternative to the current functioning of the web, and it is not the only protocol going in this direction. The data deployed on the protocol is stored, not permanently but only to the extent that the backup is useful from a network point of view.

Different decentralized applications are already developed using the IPFS protocol like Steemit or even OpenBazaar, a decentralized e-commerce platform.

Multiply the interfaces

Another alternative allows for a decentralized site to be set up or at least allows its decentralization to be strengthened.

The key objective is creating or allowing different autonomous interfaces linked to the same website, this is one of the particularities of decentralized applications deployed on public blockchains and therefore accessible to all. Anyone is thus able to create their interface to the same application. This approach can be applied in the decentralized finance ecosystem where some protocols are directly implemented on existing applications.

Encouraging your community to create independent interfaces is an interesting approach that reinforces the site’s immutability as much as its decentralization !

Decentralized search engines

It is impossible to deny that Google drains the majority of internet traffic these days which makes it the ultra-dominant search engine in the sector for the past few years.

However, there are alternatives from all sides that offer features such as greater privacy protection or the reuse of profits for ecological or solidarity purposes. Unfortunately, none of them can compete with the Californian giant and its billions of dollars of investment in research and development.

This monopolistic situation is fraught with consequences. It particularly goes hand in hand with the problem of indexing and visibility. In other words: who decides what is going to be seen and what is not? Indeed, pleasing Google’s algorithm is the Holy Grail for any website that wants to develop its audience. However, changes in the way the algorithm works are likely to harm certain websites — or even the very existence — of entire sections of the digital ecosystem.

In this respect, one will recall the recent misadventures of the Youtubers in the crypto community, which were “erroneously” wiped off the map by the fault of a capricious algorithm…

The development of community-powered search engines whose algorithms would be transparent and calibrated by the community could be the next stone in the edifice of Web 3.0. Making it public and encouraging the community to be an actor by selecting the criteria for highlighting sites could solve problems that users face today without always being aware of them.

And what about tomorrow? The future of decentralized sites

Let’s now try to project ourselves to guess what tomorrow’s decentralized websites could be. Today, the ecosystem oscillates between more or less successful experiments and projects in development. Each day spent on the Internet shows us the need for a new paradigm in Internet sites and applications.

After the Cloud revolution, are we at the dawn of the decentralization revolution? Or perhaps decentralization will only apply, as it does today, to a few particular sectors with the majority of users finally being satisfied with the golden cage of the current centralized system?

Just as Web 2.0 didn’t automatically extinguish Web 1.0 (still gathering dust around some parts of the internet), the move to 3.0 will take time and integration with existing online systems. The wheels have already been set in motion and the train has left the station. Web 3.0 is a revolution in motion, we are past the point of no return.

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About this article

This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.