Just when you weren’t already overwhelmed with all the news about the next generation of AI, chatbots that could steal your job, conversations with Bing that leaves reporters shaken and unnerved, get set for another jolt in the digital world that you should be aware of: Web3. Otherwise known as the next iteration of the internet.
Most likely, you’re reading these words on a browser in Web 2.0, where, it’s been argued, a few mega-entities like Apple, Google, and Facebook all subject us to their data privacy terms. Web3 is designed to be more secure and decentralized than Web 2.0, drawing from blockchain technology to eliminate the need for intermediaries and to give users greater control over their data and their interactions online — or so the argument goes. Read on for a few ways that Web3 is reinventing the internet.
Data Privacy
In Web3, users harness more control over their personal information and even have the ability to monetize it through micropayments.
Decentralization
Web3 is built on decentralized networks, which means that no single authority controls the flow of transactions or information within it. That structureless structure, some say, makes it more resilient to outside attacks.
Interoperability
Advocates of Web3 often point out that the current internet is akin to a constellation of balkanized fiefdoms, where a range of applications and platforms are frequently walled off from each other. Web3, by contrast, was designed to be interoperable, so disparate services can work together seamlessly.
Now for a few of Web3’s drawbacks:
The idea’s still hazy.
So far, Web3 still resides in the province of VC bets on the future of the internet, niche debates between technologists, and a rallying-cry of crypto traders and decentralized finance advocates. In short, it’s not mainstream yet. Elon Musk considers it a buzzword. Will it explode in popularity next month, or dwindle away unnoticed? Hard to tell.
Decentralization (revisited).
One of the key selling-points for Web3 is that it wrests power out of Big Tech and gives it back to everyday net users just clicking around unaware that data is being scraped off them. That’s decentralization done well. Decentralization done not so well involves the possibility of lax regulation, which might lead to the proliferation of harmful content — or the worst of what’s on the internet right now.
The corporate overlords just change.
A major concern with Web 2.0 is that the gods of Silicon Valley own it. But one of those gods, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, argues that ownership will merely change hands from Big Tech to VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested billions in the Web3 space. Humans being humans, this new internet may prove to be as un-democratic as the one that most of us use currently.
Web3 still presents a lot of unknowns to brands, but it may be potent enough of an investment to amount to a Freakonomics-type hedge against the symbols and signals in the market — the play that makes a billionaire, the blunder that toppled an industry. Perhaps the best thing to do right now is keep an eye on it. Develop a Web3 entry strategy so you’re comfortable opening, say, a fast-food restaurant in the metaverse, as Wendy’s did, when the time calls for it. Jags come and go. Yet if the new internet is here to stay, preparing for it will position you to thrive in the digital landscape of the future.