Decentralization is the main organizing principle of Web3, often said to support user ownership of content as well as disintermediation of many other operations: banking and finance, for example.
Those of you who can remember the early days of the internet--before the emergence of the World Wide Web or visual browsers and multimedia, plus the shift to read-write from read-only--might remember the early ethos of the pre-Web internet, which was collaborative.
The internet was about sharing, not commerce. The push for Web3 has a similar ethos: put control and ownership of assets back in the hands of “users.” Think of the role of peer-to-peer for a Web2 analogy of how things could work.
Has P2P revolutionized media and content; payments; finance or other functions conducted on the web? Perhaps, to a limited degree, in some areas. But P2P has not revolutionized much of anything related to the web.
We also may decry the rise of “platforms” owned by corporations or bigger firms. But in what part of the real economy does this not happen? We often applaud and support efforts to reduce inequality in any society; even to the extent of opposing rigid class structures. But where has that ever worked, one might ask.
That is hot to say something will come of Web3 that is useful. Blockchain seems destined for wider use, for example. Crypto currencies likewise should gain traction, eventually.
But we might be skeptical of the broader claims about Web3 democratizing all--or most--of the internet, preventing the rise of large new platforms. That is not to say a further balkanization of the internet is unlikely. Indeed, that balkanization has been going on for a couple to a few decades.
In a sense, Web3 appears to be the second coming of P2P. P2P did not revolutionized the web. Web3 might not do so, either.
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