Web 2.0 vs. web3. What’s going on here?

The “web 2.0” vs. “web3” debate is 🔥 right now. It might have peaked with the intervention of Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk recently. What’s going on here?

I feel directly connected to this subject, as both a Software Engineer who was a direct witness to all the last 20+ years of web evolution, and now the CEO of a bank, evolving in an industry that everyone predicts to be directly affected by blockchain-related products in the coming years.

First, a bit of context. I wrote my first lines of code around 1993, experienced the web for the first time in 1997, been coding with web technologies since 1999 (you had to learn in books at the time), became a Computer Science Engineer in 2005, and have never stopped crafting software since. I know a thing or two about how the web was built and how it evolved.

Let’s start by stating the obvious: there never was a web 0, 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 3 or anything else. There were a lot of different pieces — browsers, servers, databases, languages, frameworks, hardware, standards — which were designed and improved by hundreds of thousands of people during the last 25 years (which themselves stood on the shoulders of 50 years of computer science).

This continual evolution of technology is how we got the Internet we know today. And more people will continue to make all those pieces evolve in the future. That’s how the Internet (and software in general) became a key element of our modern lives.

At some point around 2004-2005, some people came up with the "Web 2.0" expression, and it began to be used to describe a type of website which allowed its users to not only read the website, but also to participate in its content.

When we first heard about the “Web 2.0” expression, we, web coders, all raised an eyebrow. Because let’s be clear, the Web 2.0 concept makes absolutely no sense from an engineering point of view.

What was called Web 2.0 at the time was already done on good websites for years! You could definitely interact with well designed websites. Actually most of the “new” concepts had already been demoed in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart's team. When you think about it, you could do it on Minitel apps in the 90s in France. Nothing was revolutionary. It was just that at the time, the evolution of web frameworks and web standards made it suddenly easier to write code to make it happen.

The Web 2.0 expression was certainly useful from a marketing point of view though. In 2005, the Internet was still used by a small part of the population, and the Web 2.0 concept made it easier for some decision-makers to understand that websites should not just be online leaflets for companies. You could do much more. It could be used as a really useful tools.

To my knowledge, today’s lambda users of services on the Internet have absolutely no idea of this old specialist debate. If you take a step back, Internet users have been enjoying a continuous improvement momentum which provides them with incredibly useful applications to connect to other people, to learn, to work, to communicate, and so on. That’s all. I can’t remember one successful service promoting itself as a “Web 2.0” service.

Now, fast forward to 2021, and some people have the great idea to coin the term “web3” and relaunch this old, forgotten debate. (Note that in the meantime they ditched the upper-case “W”, the whitespace, and the “.0”. At least they realized that sub-versions of Web 1.0 and 2.0 never existed — which is logical, because the web never had actual versions. Also, getting rid of the upper-case letter and the whitespace makes it much easier to write #web3 tags!).

In the minds of its inventors, the term web3 is the idea of using decentralized systems to operate the services we know today. Again, this is not a “version” of the web. It’s a way to encapsulate some concepts in an expression, and to try to convince people that this is the future and the next big thing you don’t want to miss.

The debate is mostly led today by Andreessen-Horowitz investment fund, and in particular Chris Dixon, one of the VCs in charge of their crypto fund, who began to tweet furiously about web3 during the summer. Chris Dixon and Andreessen-Horowitz are interested in promoting this concept, since web3 promotes itself their recent investments (crypto money, NFT, blockchain technology, etc.).

So, what's the concept of web3? To summarize, today’s websites and apps store their data in databases that they own and maintain. As a user, you trust these services to store your data. Although you have rights over this data, your data is not stored in your own personal vault, but in the databases.

The big idea with web3 is that instead of databases, services should use decentralized systems that give you more control over your data.

Decentralized systems are not new (there is a good chance that before subscribing to streaming services you downloaded a pirate version of a movie on a decentralized network like eDonkey or BitTorrent). Blockchain-based systems are more recent decentralized systems with interesting properties: there is no “central authority”, the data can’t be lost or altered, and it can be encrypted. Since the data can’t be altered, it makes an excellent and reliable source of truth (which is why a lot of systems which need auditability are more and more based on one of the available blockchain technologies: think of food tracking for example).

Crypto currencies are the most famous examples of applications based on a blockchain. Your data (in this case, money) is stored on a system based on blockchain architecture, which makes you the only one, thanks to your private key, to be able to provide access to your data, stored everywhere in the world.

When your data is stored on a blockchain infrastructure, you can decide which service can access it. Services don’t control this core data: they are now used as a “view” on the data. You can decide to stop giving access to your data to a certain service at any time. Or you can give access to three different services with the same data (that’s what cryptocurrency owners do when they use different apps to manage their money).

On paper, I mean, why not? Having more control over our data seems like a good thing. It seems like a good alternative to how GAFA-like companies (badly) handle our data. If you could manage your data, it would mean that you could easily decide which service would get access or not, based on how they behave.

There are downsides to this, of course. One of the biggest problems is that you, as an individual, can quickly become the biggest point of failure of the system. Today, your data is distributed across many different services. If one service is attacked or goes down, you only lose the data that was stored on that service. Tomorrow, if you control your data yourself and you lose your private key (or worse, your private key is stolen), then you lose your entire digital life (pictures, private conversations, agendas, emails, you name it).

There are means to mitigate this risk, thanks to cryptography and security systems, but if we switched to a complete “web3” paradigm, you would be essentially in charge and would need to educate yourself on very precise security concepts. Being in charge comes with giant responsibilities.

The second main downside is that building, running and maintaining a decentralized, block chain based architecture has a cost (and a big one, if you think about bitcoin). In theory, since web3 services are only ”views” on your data and don’t control it, they shouldn’t bear the costs of your own responsibility. Remember that you are in charge. Again, there are ways to mitigate this, but would you be ready to pay for the decentralized infrastructure that would handle your data?

My guess is that the vast majority of people would prefer to rely on third parties rather than taking on such a large responsibility and supporting the costs of it. But of course, the history of technology is littered with incredibly inaccurate guesses. So we’ll see.

Now, back to this “Web 2.0 vs. web3” ongoing fight. The big difference with the “Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0” fight is that… it was not a fight. Web 2.0 was meant to be a description of the ongoing evolution of websites that were becoming more and more mainstream. It was certainly also considered by developers as a concept invented by marketers to sell websites, but it was not wrong, per se. It was about what was actually happening massively on the Internet.

The web3 concept is different. It is pushed by people who have a strong interest in pushing it. It does not describe what is happening on the Internet: it describes what some people would like it to become. When you read to Chris Dixon’s communications, it looks exactly like an oracle who had an illumination, after some of his friends were harshly treated by “Web 2.0” companies, and who is trying to convert people to this new religion, where everything should be seen through the eyes of this technologic pattern.

Answers to his tweets are often funny in the sense. It looks often like “I was skeptical at first, but now I finally get it. Yes, web3 is the definitively the future! 🙌” (I was blind, but you opened my eyes and now I can see!). New zealots are joining every day and are spreading the Word on their favorite “Web 2.0” applications (oh the irony). They invent parables to inspire others to join the movement and share their faith.

I am worried than reality will certainly be way more boring than that. Blockchain technologies will continue to improve, and will be used to solve problems that can be solved by it. Services based on blockchain systems will be paid for by people who see a value in them. That’s it. Decentralized systems are just one piece of the big puzzle which helps organizations solve people issues or fill out their needs.

In conclusion, no Web 1.0, no Web 2.0, no web3, just an uninterrupted flow of small and big innovations created by passionate people, who will continue to create exceptional experiences for customers on the web and mobile.

Yeah I know, boring. That might be the reason why marketing is not my daily job 😂.