Evolution of the Web 3.0 : History and the Future

By: Devashish Gupta , Sunil K. Singh

The internet is arguably the most significant technological revolution in human history, but the web is an unfinished project. It’s hard to believe that just ten years ago the web was much different. The evolution never stops though. Web 3.0 is expected to be the new revolution in web interaction, ushering in a fundamental shift in how web developers create websites. To better understand what Web3 has for us, we must have a look at history and see how things have evolved with the time [1-4].

Web 1.0 & Web 2.0

Web 1.0 being the 1st phase of the web can be described by how users originally interacted with the web. Web1 was coined as “read-only web” as the majority of participants were content users, and the creators were way too less and were basically the developers who built websites that served up data and information primarily in the form of text and image. These were basically static HTML pages rendered onto the website. User interaction was something that was least focused at the time and major focus of the developers was to deliver content to the users [5-9].

Although with the rise of Web2, the internet was all about interactive and social web. Web 2.0 is technology that benefits multiple Billion individuals for 80% of their waking hours each and every day. Web2 came as a revolution in the world of internet and it drastically changed the whole landscape of the web in a very short span. Content creating websites such as Facebook, YouTube, blogging websites and many more such platforms fall into this category.

The internet today is pretty much collaborative and social, but it comes at a cost. The cost which most of the users ignore, but should be an issue taken care of. The exploitation and centralization of user data is fundamental to the operation of the web as we all know and use it today. Web2 apps repeatedly experience data breeches. User data is used without their consent and we have no control over it. In essence, new content is created by users who are then able to enter their profile data, which can be used by third parties for marketing purposes. This is how Web2 actually functions.

What is Web 3.0?

Web 3.0, also known as Web3, is the next generation of the internet. Intelligence is what defines it, and not just the intelligence of individuals engaging with a website or software, but also the intelligence of two or more software. To put it another way, apps created and deployed with web3 rarely utilize a single server or store data in a single database. Web3 applications, then again, run on blockchains, decentralized organizations of many shared hubs (servers), or a cross breed of the two that comprises a crypto-financial protocol. Decentralized apps (dapps) is the term that is frequently used in web3 space to describe these apps.

web 3.0
Figure 1: User distribution with each generation of Web [9]

What makes Web 3.0 different from the previous versions?

When web1 was introduced in the late 1990s, the industry grossed a turnover of around $1 trillion, but the digital world saw a significant increase in these values. Within a decade and half, it increased about 6 times grossing an approximate of $5.9 trillion. The reason for this growth was that web1 focused majorly on desktop browsers with a dedicated infrastructure similar to what we see on online shopping websites, but on the other hand web2 was always about mobile first applications and later cloud-driven too. With smartphones setting up their place in the market web2 synced pretty good in the process making a profitable business in such a short span. The future is all about Artificial Intelligence, and this is what web 3.0 focuses. AI driven services, decentralized data architecture and edge computing infrastructure are some of the technologies web 3.0 revolves around making it quite different and futuristic from the older versions.

Why should we move to web 3.0?

The construction of platforms that no single entity controls, but that everyone can trust is the essential innovation of these networks. That is on the grounds that all clients and administrators of these networks should stick to a similar arrangement of hard-coded rules known consensus protocols. Web3 is basically another way for people to go through the Internet without giving their security and sensitive information.

Yet not the Semantic Web envisioned by Berners-Lee, Web 3.0 is in various ways a re-appearance of his unique web, where “no consent from a focal authority is needed to post anything,” “there is no focal controlling hub, and in this way no weak link… also no ‘kill switch’!”. If we put it in simple words, the data is stored in the form of blocks connected with other blocks from both sides. These blocks form a network called blockchain network. The addition of every block makes the data more and secure, difficult to tamper and hence increases the security of data to a greater extent [10-14].

The ascent of advances, for example, appropriated records and capacity on blockchain will take into account information decentralization and establish a straightforward and secure climate, overwhelming Web 2.0’s centralization, observation and shady publicizing. Decentralized foundation and application stages will dislodge incorporated tech giants, and people will actually want to legitimately claim their information.

Challenges and future of Web 3.0

Web 3.0 promises verifiable, self-governing, trustless, permission-less and robust transfer of data across platforms. For the transition of web from web2 to web3, a greater number of people should start developing and using dapps. The main challenge using these dapps is that there is a large chunk of non-technical user base existing in the society. In order to make web3 a success we have to create simple dapps, which are easy to use for each and every user out there. With the advancement of technology with each other day, it won’t be a surprise if in the next several years, the internet shifts from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0.

References

  1. Dabit, N. (2021, September 26). What is web3? the decentralized internet of the future explained. freeCodeCamp.org. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-is-web3/
  2. Tran, K. C. (2019, December 4). What is web 3? Decrypt. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-web-3
  3. Chopra, M., Singh, S. K., Aggarwal, K., & Gupta, A. (2022). Predicting catastrophic events using machine learning models for Natural Language Processing. Data Mining Approaches for Big Data and Sentiment Analysis in Social Media, 223–243. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-8413-2.ch010
  4. Mersch, M., & Muirhead, R. (2021, November 2). What is web 3.0 & why it matters. Medium. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://medium.com/fabric-ventures/what-is-web-3-0-why-it-matters-934eb07f3d2b
  5. Mitra, R., & Baggetta, M. (2020, April 24). What is web 3.0? the evolution of the internet. Blockgeeks. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://blockgeeks.com/guides/web-3-0/
  6. Aggarwal, K., Singh, S. K., Chopra, M., & Kumar, S. (2022). Role of social media in the COVID-19 pandemic. Data Mining Approaches for Big Data and Sentiment Analysis in Social Media, 91–115. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-8413-2.ch004.
  7. Silver, C. (2021, December 10). Council post: What is web 3.0? Forbes. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/01/06/what-is-web-3-0/?sh=17679d4858df
  8. Kumar, S., Singh, S. K., Aggarwal, N., & Aggarwal, K. (2021). Evaluation of automatic parallelization algorithms to minimize speculative parallelism overheads: An experiment. Journal of Discrete Mathematical Sciences and Cryptography, 24(5), 1517–1528. https://doi.org/10.1080/09720529.2021.1951435
  9. Sahoo, S. R., et al. (2020). Fake profile detection in multimedia big data on online social networks. International Journal of Information and Computer Security12(2-3), 303-331.
  10. Web Architecture. (n.d.). Research Hubs. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://researchhubs.com/uploads/web-architecture-4.jpg.
  11. Gupta, S.,et al. (2017). Detection, avoidance, and attack pattern mechanisms in modern web application vulnerabilities: present and future challenges. International Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing (IJCAC)7(3), 1-43.
  12. Gupta, S., et al. (2016). XSS-SAFE: a server-side approach to detect and mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks in JavaScript code. Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering41(3), 897-920.
  13. Chaudhary, P., et al. (2019). A framework for preserving the privacy of online users against XSS worms on online social network. International Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering (IJITWE)14(1), 85-111.
  14. Gupta, B. B., et al. (2015). Cross-site scripting (XSS) abuse and defense: exploitation on several testing bed environments and its defense. Journal of Information Privacy and Security11(2), 118-136.

Cite this article as:

Devashish Gupta, Dr. Sunil K. Singh (2022) Evolution of the Web 3.0 : History and the Future, Insights2Techinfo, pp.1

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