Web 3.0: a more human Internet

Web3 and Web 3.0 promise a decentralised and more ethical future, returning control to the users. In USI's monthly column in LaRegione, Professor Cesare Pautasso analyses the challenges and opportunities of this transformation, including blockchain, digital ethics and the future of the web.

Digital assistants guided by Artificial Intelligence, the control of our data and the possible dismantling of the big technology companies: this is the future of the Internet imagined, or perhaps hoped for, by Tim Berners-Lee, the British physicist who together with his colleague Robert Cailliau created the World Wide Web 35 years ago at CERN in Geneva. 'It was supposed to be a tool to empower humanity, but in the last ten years it has seen many values eroded,' the physicist explained during several interviews last spring.

Berners-Lee has long expressed concern about the transformations that have taken place since its creation: born as a network to share information mainly in the scientific sphere (web 1.0 or static), quickly evolved into Web 2.0 (or dynamic), which of course allowed users to interact with each other, but also resulted in the concentration of power in private hands with almost no limits and allowed the profiling of personal data, which resulted in the control of the information we receive.

A new reality in sight

Instead, in recent years, a new model has emerged that, as originally intended, places individuals rather than business models at the centre. For Berners-Lee, this is an opportunity to reshape the digital future and re-prioritise the well-being, equality and autonomy of users. This is the so-called web3, which is on everybody's lips but no one has so far seen, at least not in its entirety.
This evolution is based on blockchain technology (the same used for digital currencies), and should allow us to add to the two previous - reading and writing (web1) and interaction (web2) - a third salient feature: control, i.e. the possibility of verifying everything that circulates on the Internet so as to give power back to users and remove the monopoly of the large multinationals in the sector.
Effectively, if now those dictating the rules are giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon, in the future users will be able to participate directly in the management of the web, they will become the owners of their content and be able to monetise it as they wish, they will be able to create or be part of one or more online communities or organisations, all decentralised, and perhaps even communicate without the mediation of a server.

Obstacles and limits of a decentralisation of power

Web3, with its decentralised applications (dapp), should, therefore, put users back in control, protecting their personal data and bringing an end, or at least greatly restricting it, to the power of today's big-tech companies. All this with greater transparency and with the aim of creating a global and interconnected network, which in theory is very democratic.
All perfect? Not quite. As there are still unresolved technological issues at the moment, the costs of Web3 are quite high which limit its accessibility and use, and consequently its distribution. Furthermore, as with digital currencies, blockchain requires very high energy consumption, so its sustainability is questionable.

Web 3 is complemented by the semantic web, or web 3.0, which aims to transform the web into a more intelligent and interconnected infrastructure, providing data within an organisational structure that creates logical and meaningful relationships between them, giving rise to applications that use information in a more intelligent and personalised manner. Both concepts are complementary and work towards the same goal: creating a more 'human' web.

INTERVIEW - The network of the future

Cesare Pautasso is Professor at the Faculty of Informatics at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). His teaching and training activities cover topics related to web engineering, software architectures, the use of blockchain for business process management and emerging web services technologies. We spoke with him about the web of the future.

Some 35 years ago, the World Wide Web was born. Where are we today?

Today's web is much bigger and there is much more variety than the original web, which was primarily oriented towards academics who wanted to share their scientific articles. Today, however, it has become an information and social communication system where we can find everything, a global representation of human culture.

There is talk of the third-generation web. What does that mean?

There have been several attempts to define it. Around the year 2000, people started talking about the semantic web (web 3.0), a version that seeks to give more depth to data so that its meaning becomes comprehensible to machines, while for about 10 years web3 has been linked to blockchain. However, they are labels that are used to attract attention: those who want to push a programme claim that it is the next version of the web, so it sounds like who knows what. In reality, one has to see what it actually is.

So, is there no real evolution?

There is evolution if you look at how control over data is structured, who has control of the access keys, who has the ability to turn the system on or off, and who decides what is published. In web 1.0, no one had to ask permission to create a website or insert a link and refer to another website; this was one of the revolutionary things that fostered the exponential development of the system. In web 2.0, however, control slowly went to a few sites that host user-generated content, sites that have grown enormously over time.

The so-called big-tech companies?

Yes, they are websites that have no content of their own, but collect and filter content produced by the wider community, by all the hundreds of millions of users who post on one of their sites. The problem is that they own this content, along with user data, so they decide what to do with it: whether to release it, whether to block it, whether to show it or not, whether to sell it and to whom... Web3, also thanks to blockchain, seeks to eliminate this control, democratising it and redistributing it outside these concentrations.

One of the problems of the first web was that anyone could publish, but being read was another matter.

True: I can publish anything I want, but if no one knows it exists or where to find it, no one will ever read it. That is why search engines were born: if I am doing research on a subject, they suggest where to go to find the best sites or pages. This is how it worked in the original version.

So, what changed?

Since we are all obliged to use them to find information, a technological race began to make sure that one's websites ended up at the top of the list, on the first page. Then there were those who started paying for this, so the priority search criterion became less and less relevant than other, more commercial ones. If the result is given based on content the approach is correct, if it is given based on an exchange of money then it is advertising, so we have an ethical problem, because we are confusing people when it is no longer possible to clearly distinguish organic results from sponsored results.

What about social media?

Today, federated social media networks are emerging, for example Mastodon, where there is no longer a centre but a collection of sites: anyone can post on one of these, which then link together to achieve the same result as a centralised system like Facebook. The difference is that being federated everyone locally can make the decisions on moderation and content and can filter and manage the flow of posts. This is a very different approach than one where all decisions are made centrally, for everyone equally and transparently. Not to mention that when everything is in the hands of one, that one possesses the enormous power to decide what information people can see and what they cannot.

It would seem very simple: remove some of the superstructure and return to where we started. But what about from an IT point of view?

Before Web 2.0, being on the Net required complex and costly technical steps, and even management wasn't simple; today, however, anyone can open a page on social media with a couple of clicks. The challenge now is to re-propose this convenience, this simplicity by taking it away from centralised control.

Free web and social media, however, do not offer very good guarantees, both ethically and legally. How do we solve this problem?

The web is a reflection of the highs and lows of society, and as Umberto Eco used to say, social networking has made bar-room talk a thing of the past. Today when I access the web, I do so using a browser that warns me when I am about to enter a questionable site, but this means that someone has decided in my place what is acceptable and what is not. There is also a legal framework to be respected, but technology has such a speed of evolution that the law cannot follow. Also, there are many sites that are filtered out and then pop up again somewhere else. The problem is who makes these decisions, whether the community or a private company. In smaller networks the control might be relative, because I know and trust the people involved, whereas as they grow in size the level of attention should rise. The Web 3.0 approach might be able to manage these problems in a decentralised and flexible manner.

So, in short, it is a continuous pendulum between the individual freedom to communicate and the need for any community, in this case digital, to have some form of control, to either ban or encourage the message?

Yes, I would say so. Humanity has always had many voices (individuals, organisations, authorities [in the philosophical sense, ed], media...), even conflicting ones, which we draw on. The web is the same thing, but amplified: instead of having a dozen possible media channels, we have millions and millions of websites. The browser will become an increasingly important filter, both to verify the information we read on the web and to protect the personal information we reveal while surfing.

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