How Web 3.0 Will Impact Business

The internet is changing: Web 3.0 is coming, and it will impact business.

It probably is not shocking to hear that technology changes over time. We’ve watched that happen as cell phones have evolved from giant bricks to flip phones to sleek smartphones. The growth of web technology means that we are likely on the cusp of just such a change. This change is being referred to as Web 3.0.

Examples of Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0

To understand how Web 3.0 will impact business and lead to a change in the way we all do business, it’s helpful to understand how it’s different from the first two evolutions of the internet.

In the internet’s first iteration, now dubbed Web 1.0, users were mainly consumers of information, and access to the internet was managed through internet service providers like AOL and Yahoo. Around 1999, that changed.

As Newsweek explains, “Web 2.0 started being used as a term around 1999 and is the internet that we’ve all grown accustomed to using today. In Web 2.0, content consumers were encouraged to become content creators. Rather than taking a passive approach to internet use by simply viewing, Web 2.0 provided an environment where more users could become active participants.”

Suddenly we had blogs, personal websites, business websites, and e-commerce. Social media rocketed to the forefront. As Forbes puts it, “the centralization and exploitation of data, and the use of it without users’ meaningful consent, is built into Web 2.0’s business model.”

Web 3.0

As with any new technology it’s still too early to tell exactly what Web 3.0 will be, or the parameters in which it will operate. Newsweek tells us that “Web 3.0 will, in some ways, be a return to the original concept of the web, a place where one does not need permission from a central authority to post, there is no central control, and there is no single point of failure.”

In theory, this decentralization will shift ownership of data back to the user, as information will be stored on blockchain. This, as Medium explains, “makes its use by businesses transparent, ostensibly protecting it from hacking.”