Who Should Control The Internet?
We’re operating in a Web2 world. But what does that mean and why is this important to understand?
In today’s social internet, a powerful few control nearly all of our online experiences as well as the vast amounts of corresponding data that goes along with those experiences. What you view, what you like, who you tag and where you are is not owned by you but by a select number of extraordinarily large tech companies. You’ve heard of these companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter and TikTok — and they are all centralized Web2 platforms that “own” the majority of our online existence. While much of the Web3/decentralized internet chatter feels like marketing hype right now, the core value proposition of Web3 is exciting. As the leader of a privacy-first social company, I’ve seen a growing interest in online privacy concerns over the past several years.
News story after news story shows that companies have been poor stewards of our trust and privacy, which is why I believe companies like Mastodon and my own, MeWe, have seen tremendous growth. People are fed up with being manipulated in order to obtain their data.
Web3, if executed correctly, could fundamentally disrupt the consolidation of power we see today to go from “big tech” to “people tech.”
Web3, or decentralized technology, allows the ownership of digital data to be transferred from companies to their users. There are many potential benefits to this decentralized tech — new ways to make money, new forms of governance and ultimately the promise of personal privacy and more control as an individual user of these tools. Decentralized social media fundamentally shifts the focus of control from the company to the user.
Perhaps the most prominent examples of how our digital privacy is impacted in our current Web2 world are the big social media platforms. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview with Frank McCourt, founder of the nonprofit Project Liberty, whose goal is to transform how the internet works and who benefits from the digital economy, said, “big tech knows more about me than my wife, and I didn’t give them that permission.” The article goes on to share “the fact that a few powerful internet players are ‘hoarding and exploiting’ the personal details of users which is not only inherently unfair, but also ‘socially corrosive.’” I couldn’t agree more.
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Today, there are too many barriers to switching social media platforms. If you are one of the 45 percent of users who have considered leaving Facebook or other major platforms, you likely have felt the pain of what this means: Leave the platform and leave your digital life behind as well. If you leave, most of the time the company gets to keep your “social graph” — a digital representation of your online connections.
The potential promise of Web3 is to be able to seamlessly move your digital “social graph” from platform to platform — allowing you to align your platform choices with your values.
Today, the most well-known Web3 companies are usually crypto companies, but I believe it is when social media goes decentralized that we could see the consumer benefits of this technology. From my perspective, many companies like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok are likely not going to make this transition because their business models rely on selling user data to garner advertising revenues. Others, like Discord, could lead the way in this transition because they don’t sell user data to garner advertising revenues. But in a decentralized world, each person could have their own “social graph” that allows them to keep their connections regardless of the platform they use.
It’s clear that today’s social media is not as “free” as it seems on the surface. We pay for it in the surveillance and sale of the most personal aspects of our lives — our likes, location and friends. But even if we feel manipulated, we’re stuck because all of our connections are there. Americans are concerned with how their data and information are collected and used by companies (79 percent) and governments (64 percent), according to Pew Research Center findings, and this has created a moment for change. The internet should be owned by its users — not a few extremely large and powerful corporations.
Not long ago, this might have felt like aspirational, tech-utopian dream language, but the technology and the dream are becoming a reality. It will take many entrepreneurs, business leaders and companies bravely stepping into the unknown and springing into action to make it work. I, for one, am excited by what the future of the internet — owned by the people — holds for all of us. The future of social media is decentralized, which means the future of social media is ours to own.
