Web3 – The future of the internet?

Web3 is the next version of the internet which promotes decentralized protocols and aims to reduce dependency on large Big Tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Netflix.

In order to understand what happens next we should understand the following concepts: WWW, Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and finally Web3.

WWW, 1969-1991

Research project

The first internet world wide web (WWW), since 1969, connected government agencies, private companies and universities. This was only for research (Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA) purposes. It had no commercial use.

This ARPANET founded by the US Department of Defense was replaced by the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET in 1986. Until this time WWW was a government project. In 1993 management of the internet went from federal into private hands (big telecommunications providers).

In the beginning (early 1990s) data transfer speeds of the new internet were very slow 56 Kbps (Kilobytes per second). In a couple of years transfer speeds rose to 45 Mbps (Megabytes per second) but users of this internet, still, had quite slow (dial-up) connections compared to the current version of the internet.

This was the time when the internet (the wires and network) was founded.

 

Web 1.0, 1991-2004

Linking content together

Web 1.0 was the first real world wide web for private individuals. According to cryptocurrency educator Jackson Dumont:”Web 1.0 was very simplistic. There were read-only static HTML web pages with a very simple design.”

The result was that content of the internet was there to be consumed and the users were only ”consumers of content”.

Back then the Internet was for nerds. The user experience was disabled because the internet was too slow and the content was not that interesting to many people. Although Web 1.0 had inventions like flash and java script.

According to founder of Protocol Labs Juan Benet:” Web 1.0 was like a big wikipedia all hyperlinked together.” There was no logging in and no interacting with others via posts or viewing analytics. At that time the norm was personal web pages hosted on free web hosting services or ISP (Internet Service Provider)-owned web servers.

It was possible to distribute and share documents over the network via HTTP protocol (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) using browsers. Back then the internet was really a content delivery network (CDN). It also should be noted that because of all the copy paste-distribution the user information security was non-existent.

For companies Web 1.0 was not that profitable especially by ads. The early adopter companies used the internet for just sending and receiving messages (mostly emails).

Web 1.0 was a library of knowledge: Good thing about Web 1.0 was that you could find information that you were looking for. Back then the internet was for learning and for knowledge.