#raioninfluencer Rahul Kumar Yadav: “Why do we need Web3?”

Web3 is different for different people depending on how they look at it.

For some it’s a fad, for some it’s just a buzzword & speculation, for some it’s a way for the rich to get even richer, and for some it’s the future of the Internet.

But what actually is Web3 all about?

Before getting right into Web3, first let’s understand how we got here in the first place.

To understand it most effectively, let me first help you in understanding the early days of the World Wide Web in order to better understand Web3.

Early Days of the Web

Tim Berners-Lee, a British Computer Scientist working at CERN in 1989 noticed difficulties in information sharing between scientists and institutes around the world.

He envisioned a way to solve that problem by adding a layer on top of the Internet — That became the foundation of the Web that we know today.

The overall ideology of Berners-Lee was to leverage existing evolving technologies of that time like Hyperlinking to build a powerful and easy to use Information System on the Internet.

He came up with 3 fundamental technologies HTML, URI, and HTTP in order to build the foundation of the World Wide Web. In 1991, Berners-Lee released WWW software including a line-made browser, web server and library for developers.

While helping CERN to make it ease for them to share information. Tim saw the broader impact of the technology and he always wanted it to remain an open standard protocol for the world to use without anyone having an authority to lock or turn it off.

On 30 April 1993, CERN made the source code of World Wide Web available on royalty-free basis, making it free software for the world.

Around 1994 individuals and companies started building websites on top of it. Later on, Companies like Yahoo and Google came into existence to make it easy for people to access information through a single portal.

Now, let’s deep dive into the very first version of the Web.

Web1: (1990–2004)

Web1, the very first iteration of the Web was to make it easy for the world to share information with each other. It was open standard protocol, open for all to use, control by no one, no permission required to build on top of it, and non-discrimination for using it.

To better understand, you can make an analogy of Magazine in Digital Form, not more nor less. That’s why it’s also called “Read-Only” Web. It was designed in a way for people to gain information in text form without any form of Interactivity between users. Most of the users were just content consumers.

Limitations:

• Limited features
• Lack of visual elements
• Lack of interactivity among users
• Users were just consumers of the information
• Require technical skills to become a creator

Advancement in Web technologies like HTML with CSS, birth of JavaScript, & Ajax opened up a whole lot of possibilities to build Dynamic Websites including visual, user experience and interactivity elements in it.

With this, the vision of Tim Berners-Lee for the Web started to diversify from Decentralized, Open, Free, Community Governed to Centralized, Closed, Come with cost, Corporation Governed, and Monopolized Internet.

Tim Berners-Lee himself never profited off of his invention but he was sure that his invention in the wrong hands could be very dangerous for the world.

Web2: (2005–2020)

The advancement of web technologies allowed individuals, corporations and investors to build centralized products and services on top of the Web. It allowed the creation of Dynamic Websites with ease of use, richness in visual, user experience and interactivity.

This gave birth to the Social Media (Facebook) and Web Platform (Google & Amazon) era. Initially by giving it free for users to use, collecting their data to improve user experiences, which eventually made those platforms more addictive to users and then they started monetizing user data by selling them to the advertisers.

Web1 was read-only static web pages where users were just consumers of the information. Web2 took it a step further by introducing a write feature and is called read-write web. Dynamic elements like visual and user interactivity gave users an opportunity to become content creators and not just consumers of the information on those platforms.

Web2 emphasized so much towards User-Generated-Content and built Billions of Dollars of empire monetizing on user’s sensitive data and have no proper incentive mechanism for the users yet.

Web2 has played a great role in shaping the internet we know it today but it’s doing equally harm when it comes to dominating political views by dominating information on their platform, no privacy at all with user’s sensitive data. It is doing more harm than good by integrating addictive elements onto their platform.

Problem with Web2:

• For the sake of profit it’s misusing user data
• Not proper incentives mechanism for creators
• Operate in closed ecosystem, centralized and corporate governed
• Lack of user privacy
• Data breaches
• Single point of failure, risk of censorship and security

These issues with Web2 made it clear that we cannot entrust these closed, centralized, corporation governed entities with our Data.

And this led us towards building the next generation of Web.

Web3: (2020 — Present)

Web3, the term was first coined by Gavin Wood in 2014, Co-founder of Ethereum, the biggest open source blockchain protocol that introduced the functionality of smart contracts to build decentralized applications on top of it.

The main goal of Web3 is to get back to its root of open source, decentralized, and community governed internet simultaneously giving a richness of Web2 features and functionalities.

Everything we do in Web2 can be done in Web3 but in a decentralized manner. It’s trying to achieve that by leveraging technologies like Blockchain & Cryptography, Ideology of Economics & Game Theory, and other tools for decentralization.

Promises of Web3:

• Give user the full control over their data
• Owned by community and users of it, not a single group
• Most of the values goes back to the community, users and builders
• The core strength — trustless, no intermediaries, censorship resistant
• More centric to cooperative than extractive Web
• No single point of failure — highly secure

Above are some of the promises of Web3 but not limited to.

Why does it matter?

Moving further, trusting a corporation with our data is scary and Web2 companies’ domination on the internet is gonna make it even worse.

And that’s where we need this next generation of the Internet — Web3.

What do you think? Do we really need Web3?

Feel free to provide us with your opinion and feedback in the comment.