Thoughts on Web3 on the 30th Anniversary of the Royalty-Free World Wide Web

Can Web3 live up to its promise to realize the ideals of the early web?

Over the weekend—April 30th, auspiciously enough—the world wide web celebrated 30 years of launching into the public domain. Though Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the web in 1989, and it was available to the public in 1991, it wasn’t until 1993 that the web was released to the public without any patents or fees.

It’s easy to conflate the Internet and the web, so to make sure we’re starting on the same page (from the NPR piece):

[The Internet] was also difficult to use. To read a story from NPR, for example, you would need to know which network-equipped computer had the file you wanted, then coax your machine into communicating directly with the host. And good luck if the computers were made by different manufacturers.

But 30 years ago this week, that all changed. On April 30, 1993, something called the World Wide Web launched into the public domain.

The web made it simple for anyone to navigate the internet. All users had to do was launch a new program called a "browser," type in a URL and hit return.

In this way, the web rendered the Internet more accessible—and opened up to new modes of expression, connection, and exchange. And because Berners-Lee convinced CERN to release it into the public domain, it became a public good that was able to develop freely.

A few years ago, the notion of “Web3” began to surge in popularity. Proponents argue the web has undergone three major phases: the original web of the early- to mid-1990s (which broadened information access to the many), Web 2.0 (which emphasized user-generated content and social participation), and now Web3 (which emphasizes decentralization, openness, and data sovereignty, and typically involves the use of blockchain technologies). Notably, Berners-Lee once proposed his own version of “Web 3.0” in 2009, which overlaps in some ways with the current framing in foregrounding data ownership and privacy, but doesn’t rely on blockchains, of which he remains skeptical.

It’s a weird time for Web3. Sure, we can reference the dismal state of affairs for NFTs—but I’ve lived through enough boom-bust cycles to know it’s prudent to be as cautious dancing on graves as you are surfing on hype. Practically speaking, in the ~3 years since Web3 notionally caught steam, and was heralded to change everything, very little about how we interact with the web has actually shifted from Web 2.0. It’s still more a set of ideals and experiments rather than a meaningful “disruption” to the ways power has consolidated among a handful of major players online. The crypto winter is giving cover for “buidlers” to focus on developing solutions that might not make for grabby headlines, but push the field further in the direction of being actually useful. I’m intrigued, for instance, by the prospects of the ERC-6551 standard, through which every NFT could have its own wallet.

Where I remain most excited are the possibilities of Web3 to extend the legacy of the early web through new infrastructures for public goods and commons and to use our understandings of what’s harmful about Web 2.0 to drive new understandings of individual and collective sovereignty. I encounter these efforts in my work with Protocol Labs (Disclosure: I earn income with them and hold FIL), through which I found the Funding the Commons event series and Kevin Owocki’s Green Pill podcast (both of which are great resources to find folks thinking deeply and less hype-ily about this stuff).

Last fall, I co-developed the Web3: How It’s Going summit with Zak Robinson, Nancy Baker Cahill, and Vellum LA. I keep coming back to something that Starling Lab Founder Jonathan Dotan said in his keynote, which outlined how the research center is using blockchain technologies as vehicles to securely document war crimes in Ukraine and elsewhere around the world. He said:

We need to ensure that this type of technology, which is doing this form of authentication, can’t run on hype. It’s something that requires much more than money. I want to suggest to you that in this new era that we’re entering with Web3, that there might be a different origin story for the purpose of what we’re doing. Although a lot of the technology began with work that was done during the financial crisis, trying to provide an alternative for the banking system, I wonder, maybe this is the moment where we start a new chapter and we think about the integrity of the Internet and what is under siege. Because let me be clear: Russia is in the process of removing itself from the Western Internet, so the type of authenticity that we are creating here is vital to the survival of the global Internet—it is vital to the integrity of the internet as we know it—and I want to end by saying that, although there are meaningful criticisms of Web3, and that there are reasons to believe we in fact have lost our way in thinking about the type of greed and incentives that might be animating this space, I’d argue to you that we shouldn’t run away from this type of criticism.

Instead, these are the criticisms we should lean into. The criticisms are guides for how Web3 can lean into the unique affordances of blockchains to actually make the web better.

The world wide web was novel because it created a useable interface for people to participate on the Internet, and because of the decisions of its founders, it did so as a public good. The key proposed contribution of Web3 is decentralization—the prospect of automating and scaling trust, transparency, and governance. Like Jonathan, I still see a lot of flaws and perverse incentives built into the current shape of Web3. The crazy speculation of the NFT boom made headlines, and attracted a lot of people before the technology and the existing industry was quite ready for primetime. And hey, maybe the tech will prove to be as useless as the detractors say it is (though with the flood of unverifiable content coming our way via generative AI, I doubt it). Until such a time, I see the technology as the embodiment of a set of ideals—however flawed or compromised—about what the web could be. I think a lot of people generally agree with these ideals; it would be great to experience an Internet where we could choose how our data was used and for what purposes, which foregrounded provenance, authenticity, and verifiability.

That’s why I still see a lot of possibility in the promise of Web3, and why I think it’s premature to throw the baby out with the bathwater—though the grifters and culture of greed are undeniably frustrating. Ultimately, the technology and the community surrounding it are imperfect and still relatively nascent. I’m excited by those who continue to use this moment as an occasion to (try to) produce more equitable outcomes, improve access to knowledge and information, and scale decisionmaking structures that benefit the good of the many over the interests of a select few.

When our efforts are directed toward embracing these possibilities—whether or not that involves the word “blockchain”—we carry the legacy and core ideals of the original web.