Web3: The bull case for the Internet Computer

The next wave of innovative applications, business, digital personas, finance, and entertainment will be built on decentralized infrastructure. Their creation will come from the community, for the community and further controlled by the community. Such are the promises of web 3.

In working towards the decentralized world of web 3, it's important to understand where we've come from, where we are now, and what work lies ahead.

Once upon a time in Web 1

In the 90's, surfing the web often entailed getting over-excited the sound of a dial-up internet connection and the count of results from early search engines. For the first time we had access to a world of information at our fingertips. Looking back, it seems primitive, but we should not discard the revolutionary nature of the network that came together to form what we now call Web 1.

Considering the history of the internet, the two major contributions of web 1 were

The creation of the network itself
Read access - users access and read materials from a select bunch of early internet contributors.

Enter Web2

Web2 brought us many great applications that enabled us, as users, to engage in a more meaningful way with the internet. Through the platformization of the services we used, we could moved from the era of 'read-only' web to one where we could 'read and write' and begin to digitize our lives. However, without careful consideration, many issues can arise when shifting our physical lives to the digital realm. Because web2 platforms are largely centralized and owned by a handful of organizations, ownership of data, decisions around development and content moderation saw us quickly run into problems of trust, censorship, availability, privacy, security and more. The core of the services and applications on the internet remain in the hands of a few organizations, rather than with the users who provide and consume the content.

The goals of Web3

Web3 aims to overcome the issues found in web2 by removing the central point of trust and shifting control to the people who build, contribute to, and use the internet and its services. There are a number of ways in which this can be achieved, but the most promising is by leveraging decentralization of information and computing offered by blockchains.

It has become widely know that blockchains support tokens, often in the form of cryptocurrencies, but other tokens are emerging which enable us to take a more active role in the applications we use. With tokenization we can move to a 'read, write and own' iteration of the internet.

An important point to note is that in the transition to web3, to truly overcome the pitfalls of web2, we should aim to build applications that are decentralized at every point in the stack. If any part of developing, operating, or governing is not decentralized then it remains the case that there is a single party who can control our use of the dapp.

Features we can expect from Web3 include:

Read: Users should be able to read and interact with applications without fear that one decision-making organization will revoke access.
Write: We should be able to contribute to, develop, provide content without handing over control of our data and barriers of entry.
Own: We should be able to own our digital assets, through to form of tokens or otherwise.

What do we need to get there

In order to reach this vision of web3, there are a number of changes that need to be realized:

Developers should be able to build dapps that are fully onchain
It should be the case that a dapp can serve contents directly into users browser
Users should be able to use a dapp without requiring tokens: no entrance barrier with Internet Identity
The operational cost of running a dapp should be comparable to running a web2 application (e.g. on AWS)
We should be able to easily tokenize dapps so that users can participate in ownership, success, and governance, while developers have a sustainable way to raise funds

How does the IC help us to get there?

Canister smart contracts - allow to serve webpages without the need for centralized services
Internet Identity - allows to interact with dapps without the need of tokens
Network nervous system - allows users to stake tokens, and earn rewards for participating in governance of the Internet Computer
Service nervous system - allows developers to easily tokenize dapps to raise funds, giving ownership to the users, and to crowdsource decision making