Saturday, June 11, 2022

Why Web 3.0 is Likely to Fail in Some Ways, Succeed in Others

The whole point of Web 3.0 is a change in the architecture of the World Wide Web, where decentralization of applications is founded on user control and ownership of their data. The extent to which decentralization succeeds is based in part on the actions advertising ecosystem participants take, since the whole “centralization” of the present web is driven by the revenues made possible by centralization and scale. 


source: TBD 


Also unclear is why any businesses that profit from “centralized” architectures will voluntarily give all that up. “They will be forced to do” is the retort. Value destruction, to be sure, has been part of most internet disintermediation of the past. 


One possible outcome is that value simply is destroyed at many points of the ecosystem, reducing the value of investing. Recall that past hopes for “decentralized value creation” often have failed. Some entities have made a business out of user-generated content, to be sure. But relatively few have done so. 


About the only participants that will prosper from Web 3.0 are the venture capitalists funding startups in the space. 


Some of us would argue that decentralization in the form of disintermediation is likely to happen, but without the more-futuristic advantages of “users owning their own data.” Blockchain will be foundational. But that is likely to fuel disintermediation of value chains, not a complete change of web business architecture.  

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