Recently i heard about Web 3.0.
Ok, not that recently, but like all such things, it bubbled up enough that i finally decided to pay some attention to it. Mostly based on this thread touting the glory that would be Web 3.0
Web 3.0 is a bit… i’m going to say nebulously… defined. The shortest answer is some hand waving about using blockchain to ensure that content remains distributed and not centralized like it is with Web 2.0. (Yeah, i know. Granted, i had thought that Web 2.0 was where every site had an API and you could use data however you wanted, and THAT got replaced by Web 3.0, but apparently i was jumping the gun a bit.) To be honest, i still haven’t found a good tutorial about how one goes about setting up a truly distributed node that is Web 3.0 compliant, but i found a bunch of articles that point to subscription sites where you can easily get going building your unique “Hello World” site, for reasons? Even those are mostly focused on instantiating identity (although those might be semi-disposable, and since there’s payment, i’m not going to use ‘anonymous’ because, yeah, they’re not at that point.)
i have questions and concerns about this proposed system. i mean, aside from the not insignificant concerns about block chains in general, i’m just going to focus on that whole “content” part.
Let’s say you’ve created some bit of media. It could be a book, song, video, picture, or just a short, pithy message, but by God, it’s yours. You initialize a chain tied to yourself and the media and set it loose on the internet, and… well, then what? i’m going to presume that there’s some media amplification site. Some site where folks tend to already congregate and share quality content among themselves. A place where content may be suggested (or blocked) by some controlling entity based on either some set of rules or a set of, say automated processes that automatically highlight content of interest. Maybe you’ll use one or more of those. i’ll note that one of the BIG reasons that sites got away from having APIs is the general headaches they introduce for very little return value.
Ok, so now your precious media is gathering a bit of a following. Yay! So much so that you’re seeing your content duplicated, because the blockchain only protects the concept of ownership, not the content, and the media can be easily extracted using any number of methods, like screenshotting, or setting up an external recording device. Oopsy!
Right, so let’s now say that you’re a very large media company, one which has a VERY strong investment in media generation, management and control. Where Intellectual Property (IP) drives every decision. Obviously, you don’t want to just hand out your money source, so instead what you hand out are licenses that allow customers to consume your IP within the constraints they’ve paid for. For them Web 3.0 is awesome, because now there’s a hard declaration of who crafted the IP, who consumed it, and where it might go beyond that. Now you’ve got a super clear cut case if a content owner duplicates the data out of license, or shares it, or passes it along to unlicensed parties, or anything else you may not like, and you’ve got the legal trail to prove it.
Of course, users might try to bypass your protections in fun ways, so you implement fingerprinting systems to look for partial content and thankfully similar existing systems are flawless works of science that are never ever abused. Nor do studios ever bring charges against customers that are not grounded in hard evidence. i mean, the internet is a copy machine, and this adds a fun machine id code to everything.
So, yeah, that’s just one aspect of Web 3.0 that i started mulling over.
There’s a term i’ve heard recently that i like. Technologists tend to be blinded by Utopia. It fits in well with my theory of the Magnificent Hammer. (You’ve heard “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”? Well, if you work in building, designing and selling hammers, suddenly hammers are the perfect tool for EVERYTHING. That’s a Magnificent Hammer.) Being blinded by Utopia means that folks become so enamored with their end goal and the wonders that it will bring that they completely miss the horrors that may accompany it.
Web 3.0 (as it’s defined here) is full of raging horrors and you really don’t have to look super hard to see them. i just picked one at random. i didn’t even get into the whole mess about how this destroys privacy, potentially limits access to just the rich, and all the other woes i can spot.
Just gonna pass on this one.
Hard pass.
CDF
