Web 3 Returns Powers To Users (W05)

Web3 Returns Powers to Users

The end of Year 2022 may denote the start of a shift of power over the control of data stored across the Internet from the big players to local communities. Big players here refer to Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and many others in the same league. These people operate platforms on which users generate a lot of data in real time. Such data is best known as Big Data. Data is valuable and Big Data is even more valuable. Why? The explanation is given in this article. The big players own a lot of Big Data created by user communities around the world. Imagine that Data = Money. Many economists have started to see data in the same class as money, land, labour, or basically a valuable resource.

A MIT professor in USA, Alex Pentland, has written an article published by the Communications of the ACM to propose the creation of data unions for data akin to credit unions for money. Credit unions are legitimate cooperatives in each country of sovereignty. Money can be exchanged internationally as currencies. Can we do the same with data? Yes, when and if the government of sovereignty is prepared to legislate the status of data as an asset that has a value for exchange or trading.

Internet crypto technologies like Blockchain will be needed to protect the ownership of data that can be widely distributed around the Internet. These technologies have appeared and will become more commonplace or even compulsory on the Internet over time. Some people coined the term Web3 to denote the situation when it becomes a standard feature of the Internet.

Why the 3rd generation of web? We have Web1 for the beginning of the Internet era and websites were pretty static then. Next, we have Web2 when websites are much more dynamic and interactive than the beginning. This is when platforms started flourishing. Platforms are where the users produce and consume. Platform operators are the big winners. They own Big Data that are collectively generated by users. When and if the control of data is taken away from platform operators, the Internet will be truly distributed in terms of data ownership. This is Web3. Nevertheless, Web3 has also been used in other contexts such as virtual realities and metaverses. This article talks about data ownership only.

Is data valuable for the operation of a business? The universal answer is affirmative. When all data are put together, the collection contains additional information not available in individual data. The additional information is latent, that is, not visible until processed by machine learning. The latent information is converted into intelligence in real time. Furthermore, the intelligence is not static but dynamic. It adjusts in real time to reflect the change of situation indicated by more recent data. Platform operators therefore possess a lot more intelligence than all other people or organizations.

The value of data is becoming more obvious over time. Cloud computing is associated with centralized ownership of data by platform operators. When the concept of data unions is well understood and received, platform operators may become trustees of user communities. This will be a sea change of the Internet culture and another real step towards democracy. In the meantime, one should review if data is safely protected against 3rd party use and what we should do if not. Pay more attention to the value of data.