Web3 - User Created and User Owned

Since the mid 1990’s when the world wide web first emerged as mass communication platform the internet has seen two distinct phases with blockchain technologies ushering in a third era.

WEB 1.0

The first iteration of the internet was characterized by centralized content creation dominated by a few large players; it mirrored the media landscape of the time. 

Media companies and publications that were previously limited to print or TV, now could reach their global audience along a new dimension. The miniscule marginal cost of a user loading a webpage compared to the cost of printing another magazine signaled a significant shift in media distribution. 

Despite these new distribution mechanics, early web content creators consisted largely of traditional media organizations applying their pre-internet business model to this new frontier. Similarly, early e-commerce mirrored the retail landscape of the time. It consisted primarily of brick-and-mortar stores setting up an online presence being fulfilled by the same centralized operations.

WEB 2.0

The second age of the internet was characterized by “social media” consisting of user generated content. Instead of limiting the usage of the internet purely as a distribution platform for professional media companies, a new class of corporation arose that did not create any content themselves but instead built the infrastructure to allow users, the general population, to create and publish content themselves. 

Content in this age was no longer limited to tangible media; reports, tabular data, stories, art, but also began to encompass interpersonal communications and link information of the “social graph” that was born out of this age. The “blog” was the earliest example of user generated media consisting initially of simple text posts; now, images, videos, tweets, likes and follows are all invaluable user generated content for social media platforms.

In this paradigm the centralized services own the infrastructure to both store and interact with data. Web 2.0 corporations also earn all income derived from the service including ad revenue generated via the content & income from selling “social graph” data. The value users derive, after having given up the rights to their content, is whatever intrinsic value they receive from using the product.

WEB 3.0

If Web 1.0 was utilizing the internet to enhance the distribution of content, and Web 2.0 was the internet applied to content creation, then Web 3.0 is what happens when the internet impacts ownership of that content. 

In this world, users own their own content; it is stored on public cloud infrastructure powered by blockchains and centralized services can only act as an interface to this data. In such a world, any conceivable revenue model needs to include the content creator. 

While there is still a need for an application layer developed by centralized organizations to facilitate content creation and consumption, the decentralized nature of the underlying data resists application layer monopoly.

This is how web3 protocols will deliver a new internet for everybody.