Nowadays, web browsing has many advantages if we compare it to how it was in its beginning, a couple of decades ago, but... Don't we sometimes make a mental facepalm because the search engine of the day gave us a result that has nothing to do with what we want?

You may even have thought at some point how great it would be if the artificial intelligence we use on a daily basis were a bit more... intelligent? The truth is that, as valuable and advanced as they are today, they sometimes come up a bit short when it comes to replacing the interpretation of a human being.

Our current Web2 brought changes that, as a result, gave us an absurd amount of tools and possibilities: from the platform where I am writing these lines to, probably, the one you are using to read this.

But this evolution also produced some problems that have not gone unnoticed, at least for those who began to talk about and realize the next leap, one that we have not yet fully seen: Web 3.0.

In this article, we will explain what Web 3.0 or Web3 is, take a brief look at its predecessors (Web1 and Web2), and discuss its importance, as well as its qualities and new issues.

Past and present of the Web

Before explaining what Web3 is, we must explain where this concept comes from and what Web1 and Web2 are.

Web1

In 1989, English scientist Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), was responsible for creating what we know today as the World Wide Web. Tim had noticed the difficulties in sharing information among the thousands of workers at CERN, so it was necessary to optimize this sharing process.

"There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need for change."

H. G. Wells

Originally, Tim's creation was aimed at sharing information more efficiently, and therefore he gave it to the world for free, because he thought that otherwise, it would not reach its true potential (World Wide Web Foundation, n.d.-a). And he was right, because the opening of the World Wide Web allowed its development and dissemination worldwide, to the extent that we know today. From the beginning, it had a scientific approach.

It should be noted that the Web is not the same as the Internet, since the latter had already been created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. This first network was known as ARPANET, which began operating in 1969 (Leiner et al., 1997). In other words, the Internet originally had military use.

The Internet is a network of devices connected to each other. These connections can be wired or wireless, and are based on a client-server duality, with the client requesting the information and the server storing it and providing it to the client.

The World Wide Web would also be a network of connections, but between digital spaces based on this network of devices. Its basis is hypertext, which would be a text linked to another location, such as another section of this document or other articles. Therefore, the Web needs the Internet to function.

This first Web had only texts and hypertext, and almost no aesthetic features. It only allowed reading the content, so it was not possible to add, edit or interact with it in almost any way. This era or stage of the web, limited to reading, is what is known as Web1.

Foto: Huffpost. This screenshot taken from the CERN website serves as an example of what the Web was originally like: simple text, hypertext, and read-only. This is why it is also known as the static web.

Web2

During the 2000s, the proliferation of cell phones, the emergence of new programming languages, and many other innovations (Vermaak, n.d., Mersch and Muirhead, 2019) allowed content to be socialized through users' interaction with it. This is when Facebook, YouTube, and other interactive platforms began to emerge.

These platforms added to web browsing, which until then was limited to reading, the possibility of writing (editing, commenting), and, in general, interacting with the content. This gave birth to Web2, Web 2.0, or Social Web, which, as you may have noticed, is the one we currently use.

This term was introduced by Darcy DiNucci in his 1999 article "Fragmented Future", and later popularized by Irish entrepreneur Tim O'Reilly at a 2004 conference. The term arose precisely to differentiate classic static websites from emerging interactive websites (Neolo, 2016).

While the consolidation of these advances brought with it much of what we love about the web, it also produced issues regarding user integrity, mainly pertaining to security and privacy. This is due, in part, to the fact that our Web2 has become a data farm, which massive companies like Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook) commercialize, exposing users.

Although there are many advantages that the services of these companies offer, we should not give up our rights when using the web, so, considering this, new alternatives have emerged, which promise a new stage in the development of the web.

Web3: the future

It was Gavin Wood, a British programmer and co-founder of Ethereum, who in 2014 introduced the concept of Web 3.0 (Kharpal, 2022). Since then, it has become popular and much has been said about it. But, in essence, it refers to a new stage of the web that is currently under development (by multiple companies and users, being perhaps one of the most intertwined technological evolutions within society, that has occurred in history). It is also often referred to as the Semantic Web.

This new stage would seek, among many things, to recover some of the benefits of Web1 in terms of privacy and security, preserving the positive advances of Web2 and adding new functions and advantages. Some examples are:

• Greater privacy: These applications and platforms would seek to work with as little personal data as possible, which is beneficial for the protection of our online privacy. With this, new digital identities linked to a real person would emerge (Bit2Me Academy, n.d.).

• Improved interpretation: With the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning (a term that refers to automated machine learning, such as that performed by Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant), we are pointing towards a future in which the meaning of what we input is interpreted in a "human" way. In this way, a platform could come to understand the meaning behind, for example, slang or a meme. This would help us to get more accurate results for our searches and more appropriate solutions to our digital needs. Information is processed in a conceptual and contextual way. This is why it is called Semantic Web.

• Decentralization: This is one of the fundamental concepts of Web 3.0. In the Web2 model, information is processed in central repositories or databases. In these databases, information is vulnerable to manipulation or alteration. However, in decentralized models, connections are peer-to-peer (i.e., from one user to another) without the need for a large intermediary, and without going through a central database. Information is supported on blockchains (Blockchain), where manipulation is much more difficult to perform.

• Ability to verify/own: One of the most talked about advantages is related to NFTs, being another fundamental pillar of Web3, is the generation of an ultra-accurate activity log, which would allow us to verify the origin and modifications of every single thing we come across. This will be a leap forward for the ownership and credibility of information on the Internet.

Web3 also brings with it problems in terms of accessibility, since it requires a certain level of knowledge and resources for its use, according to some media such as Bit2Me Academy (n.d.), but with ongoing development being carried out, we can be confident that solutions to these problems will probably be found.

In short, Web3 is the sum of several technologies and tools in constant development. Although it is still at an early stage, the reality it will bring for Web browsing makes it worthwhile to immerse ourselves in these new efforts and keep up to date with the new possibilities and opportunities that are presented to us.