The Evolution of the Web

1.0 was rough, 2.0 became tyrannical, and 3.0 is only now emerging.

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered tremendous shifts in the way that people work, play, and communicate. We can see the changes in internet traffic, particularly resulting from video streaming and work from home, and there is considerable work underway to shape the next phase of internet evolution.

The World Wide Web has been with us long enough to be broken into distinct generations, often dubbed "Web 1.0", "Web 2.0", and the emerging "Web 3.0".

Web 1.0

The first generation - Web 1.0 - is largely thought of as a read only web of static pages that people used to gather information. While usage was ongoing in this pattern, technology and standards were established to enable the next generation. This period extends roughly between the late 80s and mid 2000s.

Finding things was a bit of a challenge during the Web 1.0 era, and Yahoo! dominated the early days with manually curated lists of links. In the early 2000s, Google appeared and swiftly rose to dominance.

Media services (music and movies) were not well developed, and bandwidth limitations made realtime streaming impractical for most users. During this time, peer to peer file sharing became a primary class of traffic as people shared pirated copies of music and movies among themselves, generally ignoring intellectual property and royalty fees. At the height of the peer to peer free-for-all, these protocols accounted for around two thirds of network traffic.

Asymmetric key cryptography became widely known during the first generation as well. HTTPS was available to secure sensitive web communication very early on, and PGP was available for encrypting personal files or email. PGP also offered a simple means of self-identification, but never did gain widespread adoption.

Web 2.0

The second generation - Web 2.0 - is often called the Read / Write Web as platforms emerged making publishing easy enough for most people. Blogging, micro-blogging, and social media have become ubiquitous among casual internet users and professional content producers alike. Commercial streaming services carrying music and movies provided much greater convenience than peer to peer file sharing had.

Web 2.0 platforms enjoyed tremendous success despite centralizing traffic and content atop intentionally decentralized protocols. Social media referral traffic to sites and blogs exceeded search in 2014, 2015, and 2016. Peer to peer traffic declined precipitously, replaced by commercial streaming. It was widely understood that social platforms fully respected freedom of speech, and consumers seemed quite willing to buy monthly subscriptions for easier access to music and movies.

Cryptography also gained ground during Web 2.0. HTTPS is now used to secure the vast majority of web traffic, and email has become considerably more secure as a result of DKIM, which establishes the provenance of email with a cryptographic signature. People use both without even realizing it.

PGP, on the other hand, has fallen largely into disuse. While HTTPS and DKIM have become ubiquitous, intentional user-driven use of cryptography has become anachronistic. Secure messaging platforms have emerged, but the cryptography is hidden behind graphical interfaces, and most users are only vaguely aware of the security details.

Web 3.0

We are presently between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, and the full contours of Web 3.0 are not yet visible. It is generally accepted that Web 3.0 will return to some of the initial promises of the Web 1.0 days that Web 2.0 has abandoned in recent years, but precisely how that comes about is still open for discussion.

The time is right for a shift. Social media companies find themselves in the contentious business of censorship, and they have strangled off-platform referral traffic to such an extent that Google alone now accounts for eight times the aggregate referral traffic from all social sites. Despite a decided victory in referral traffic, Google is also challenged with accusations of censorship.

The long tail overtook the short tail in video streaming in 2019, BitTorrent saw the largest increase of outbound bandwidth share in 2019, and the peer to peer WebRTC protocol ranks third in the messaging category.

There seems to be consensus that Web 3.0 will leverage asymmetric key cryptography to put more power into the hands of users (and by implication, remove it from platforms), and there is considerable enthusiasm around the use of immutable ledgers for this purpose. Given the Web 2.0 experience, it is important that approach the issue of centralized authority carefully.