Web 3.0: the decentralised web promises to make the internet free again
Senior Lecturer in Law at Aston University. is Senior Lecturer in Law and Cybercrime, University of Portsmouth.
If you have recently considered deleting your Facebook account, boycotting Amazon or trying to find an alternative to Google, you are certainly not alone. The tech giants are invading our privacy, misusing our data, strangling economic growth and helping governments spy on us. Yet because these few companies dominate so many of the Internet’s key services, it seems there is little people can do to avoid having to interact with them if they want to stay online.
However, 30 years after the world wide web was created, a third generation of web technology might offer a way to change things. The DWeb, a new decentralized version of cyberspace, promises to enable better user control, more competition between Internet firms and less dominance by the large corporations. However there remain serious questions over whether it is possible – or even desirable.
