- Lucia Blasco
- BBC News World
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Web3, the third era of the World Wide Web, guarantees safety and freedom
In our hyper-connected world dominated by world broad net connections, it is arduous to think about pundits arguing that the Internet wants a “large overhaul.”
However, it is the very ubiquity of the Internet that has led increasingly more expertise professionals to work on what they name the “new period” of the Internet.
They argue that the present Internet, which is thought of the “second era”, should change to turn out to be extra clever. They imagine it ought to evolve right into a “semantic net” that, along with being extra environment friendly, will give us extra management over our information.
This is what they predict with the arrival of a expertise known as Web 3.0, which many in the tech trade are calling “the nice revolution of the Internet.”
This new community, abbreviated as Web3, permits machines to interpret a lot bigger quantities of knowledge. This permits us to work together far more deeply with different customers on any platform, amongst others.
In this “new chapter” of the Internet, we are going to now not want complicated working methods or massive “arduous drives” to retailer data, as a result of all the things shall be in the “cloud”. In addition, all the things shall be a lot sooner and customizable.
In basic, it can be mentioned that machines “collaborate” with people extra successfully in Web3. However, its foremost worth is the decentralization of the Internet: making a fairer community and lowering the energy of the so-called “Internet giants” – large firms in the digital expertise sector – who’re behind this new idea.
This change has been in the works for years and is already affecting Silicon Valley (a area of the US state of California representing the expertise trade). The time period Web3 was coined in 2014 by the British Gavin Wood, the founding father of the ethereum cryptocurrency, along with the Russian-Canadian Vitalik Buterin.
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British engineer Gavin Wood coined the title Web3 in 2014
Just as Tim Berners-Lee is thought of the “father of the World Wide Web,” Wood is the “father of ether,” the world’s second most generally used blockchain protocol. This expertise is the foundation of Web3.
Wood, the creator of the Polkadot open supply undertaking, began with the thought that he wanted to “reshape the Internet”: create a brand new structure with a particular protocol so that providers can be decentralized.
To obtain this aim, the British laptop engineer created the Web3 Foundation to finance the analysis and improvement groups that based Web3 and created the Parity Technologies blockchain infrastructure firm for “decentralization” based mostly in Berlin, Germany. community”.
What do you imply by “decentralized”?
“In the starting, the Internet was an open and decentralized protocol,” explains Ursula O’Quingtons, director of communications at Parity Technologies, to BBC Mundo (BBC Spanish Service). “From the Nineteen Nineties, it began to consolidate with the large tech firms that we all know as we speak. What we would like with Web3 is to return to the essence of the Internet, to the starting: that nobody can management this software on a big scale. The quantity of communication that occurs in our day by day lives.”
At the core of Web3’s framework is blockchain expertise, which permits for the creation of “blocks” and the formation of knowledge chains. Blockchain is primarily often called the basis of cryptocurrencies.
If Web 1.0 (Web1) was based mostly on hyperlinks and Web 2.0 (Web2) befell in social networks, Web 3.0 (Web3) is based mostly on blockchain expertise.
“We should maintain an open thoughts as a result of blockchain is far more than cryptocurrency. Web3 is far more attention-grabbing than token worth,” O’Quingtons mentioned.
In reality, the components that make Web3 doable have been developed over the previous few years, and in a means, that’s true. Its expertise, nonetheless, has not but been mastered or broadly utilized by the basic public.
“Faster, Safer and Opener”
Colin Evran has been working in Web3 improvement for 5 years. It runs the Filecoin and IPFS ecosystems, two protocols created by Protocol Labs, a blockchain expertise firm based mostly in San Francisco, California (USA), whose aim is to “decentralize the Internet.”
“Plenty of my work is about accelerating the transition from Web2 to Web3,” he advised BBC Mundo. “Our aim is to innovate the Internet to make it sooner, safer, extra resilient, and extra open.”
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One of the said objectives of Web3 is to present customers extra management over their information.
To perceive how Web3 works and how briskly and versatile it can be, we should first perceive how the Internet was created and the way it has modified over the years.
“If we take a look at the early days of the Internet – the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies – we see that it was earlier than the Internet: it was a mix of cables and a community that ‘linked issues,'” recollects Evran. “Initially, it was a authorities undertaking known as Arpanet to move data.”
In 1990, the World Wide Web (WWW) was created by the British Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN analysis institute in Switzerland. This first net expanded and introduced the Internet worldwide in the second half of the Nineteen Nineties. But websites and portals at the time, like Yahoo, had been nonetheless static pages based mostly on hyperlinks—also called easy hyperlinks—that took the consumer from one handle to a different.
In the 2000s, Web 2.0 arrived. The foremost achievement of Web2, Evran recollects, was that it “allowed us to learn and write interactively.” “Mobile apps and the net can ‘speak to one another’ and we can work together with them.”
The third mannequin, based on Evran, will lead the Internet to a fair higher period. “The improvement of Web 3.0 provides belief to all of this, as civil liberties are built-in into its core construction,” he says.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) controls greater than 40% of the information storage market
Evran additionally criticizes the “centralization” of Web 2.0. “Some cloud storage service suppliers, banks and large governments have all the energy and can management and manipulate information as they see match to earn cash and fulfill their very own pursuits,” says Evran. “We can’t imagine these organisms aren’t utilizing our information.”
new structure
So what modifications with Web3? “It will change the whole structure of the Internet,” replies Evran. The professional says, for instance, Web3 “permits customers to entry 1000’s of knowledge facilities round the world and select who shops their information and the way.”
Amazon, Google and Microsoft at the moment dominate the cloud information storage market. According to 2019 McAfee information, the first firm with a subsidiary AWS controls 41.5% of the complete quantity. It is adopted by Microsoft’s Azure with 29.4% and Google Cloud with 3%.
According to a report by Synergy Research Group, these three firms personal half of the world’s 600 largest information facilities. According to Evran, Web3 may have “clear mechanisms” to confirm the information and eradicate the drawback of faux information – so-called “faux information”.
At its most technical, there is the difficulty of protocols. “When you open Google or some other browser and go to a web site, you’re utilizing the HTTP protocol [nascido com a World Wide Web de Berners-Lee]. You “inform” this protocol to search for a file in a particular location, Evran describes.
He likens the sample to searching for a ebook in the metropolis. “It’s like you must undergo the New York Public Library to discover a ebook. If that library collapses or the authorities installs a watchdog, you can now not entry the contents. It’s a centrally managed construction.”
Web3 works differently. “In the world of Web3, each copy of the ebook is compressed in a cryptographic algorithm that can’t be manipulated. We can share it with out connecting to the community,” says Evran.
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The present HTTP protocol was born in the Nineteen Nineties with the World Wide Web
It is a peer-to-peer (P2P) expertise that permits sources to be exchanged on a peer-to-peer foundation, instantly between a number of customers, which, based on Evran, is not doable with present Web2 and the HTTP protocol it makes use of. .
Ursula O’Quingtons explains that Web3’s blockchain expertise is very safe and “no one has been capable of break into it for over a decade now.” “In the century through which we reside, the difficulty of safety is essential, as a result of increasingly more of our lives and information are on the Internet,” provides the professional.
A sluggish course of
Those concerned in Web3 predict that these modifications will give Internet customers extra management over the data they can entry and the information they share, and create a freer and extra equal Internet.
But the promise that Web 3.0 can break the hegemony of tech giants like Google or Facebook is questionable. There are skeptical voices like Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who posted an ironic touch upon Twitter a couple of days in the past. “Has anybody seen Web3? I can’t discover it.”
Or the voice of Jack Dorsey, the founding father of Twitter, who mentioned that Web3 is “a centralized group, however with a unique label.”
However, Colin Evran doesn’t lose his enthusiasm for innovation.
“The transfer from Web1 to Web2 was a giant transition that took a few years. The transition from Web2 to Web3 is inevitable, but it surely will not occur in a single day, it would take years. It’s taking its first steps.”
It reveals the participation of members of the world expertise neighborhood. “The variety of builders concerned is a transparent indication that the creators of the future Internet are betting on Web3.”
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The creation of Web3 is nonetheless in its infancy
Evran believes that Web3 will “renew the Internet with a totally new paradigm and shall be far more democratic than Web2.” “If we deal with creating the Internet, in the subsequent 5 to 10 years we can put information again into the palms of customers. That’s what I would like for myself and my kids.”
The O’Quingtons agree that change is “not a simple process”, however that we’ve a fairer and extra equitable web. “We’re nonetheless in the very early phases. “All this has simply begun to broaden and is nonetheless underneath building,” says the professional.
“But in 2021, we noticed a giant increase with the improvement of NFTs [bens digitais] and metaverses [realidades virtuais]. In 2022, we are going to see important modifications akin to the enlargement of those applied sciences, none apart from Web3.”
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