Web3 Will Dethrone the Web2 Gatekeepers

Apple, Microsoft and Google control 65% of the cloud hosting market, where they exercise virtual censorship by knocking certain services off of those clouds. Without these key vectors for distribution, it effectively puts an app or service out of business in the mobile software world.

That’s going to change, Cointelegraph writes.

While the mobile-powered software revolution made life as easy as the push of a button, as with anything else, it came with its own compromises. With software eating the world, it became the province of very few, very large cloud hosting companies...

This created its own sort of shadow monopoly via cloud hosting. For example, with cloud hosting in particular, hosts can knock services off of clouds, as Amazon did with the notorious social media service Parler. Parler was also banned from Apple’s App Store.

When it comes to the larger issue at stake here, it doesn’t matter whether or not you agree with a service like Parler. What the incident demonstrated was that it only took two companies, Amazon and Apple, to completely knock a service offline, effectively putting it out of business in the post-software world.

What happens when a service or developer runs afoul of a more innocuous Amazon policy or term of service? The internet has been painted into a corner where it can no longer truly be a marketplace of free ideas and free development, especially if that development is somehow perceived as a threat by companies like Amazon and Microsoft.

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Just as Bitcoin “broke” money and allowed people to think about the exchange of value in new ways, newer blockchain protocols have the chance to “break” data in a world that has been consumed by software and oligopolistic companies, allowing us to think about the exchange of that data in new ways.

Web3 and the projects it will birth promise to redefine how information lives and is carried through the internet autonomously and transparently. Decentralization-first and community-first ecosystems promise to put power back into the hands of developers and, thus, the users who will use their decentralized applications (DApps) and software. This will allow for a common framework that promotes best practices and economies of scale that will be able to compete with the largest centralized entities on the internet.

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For a new decentralized internet to work, it will mean users buying into nodes and developers best utilizing those nodes to build software that is simple enough to run and access on one’s phone as Uber or Wordle.

If the decentralized Web3 community is able to do that, we can restore the world that was eaten by software, one node at a time.

Web3 will deliver decentralized hosting, markets and social media where users, developers and content creators have all the control. We believe the days of the Web2 gatekeepers are coming to an end.