Flash forward: What will internet of the future look like?

NEW YORK: Are we on the cusp of yet another internet revolution? We are, according to technology experts gathered in Berlin for a conference organised by digital learning platform ada. New technology could overhaul the web as we know it in the coming decade, they said — both when it comes to how it is built and how it looks. On a technical level, tech idealists hope that blockchain technology will help build a new decentralised architecture underlying the internet. In this new “web3” era, the idea goes, users rather than a handful of tech giants would have control over their data, privacy, and what they create online.

“This reinvents how the internet is set up in the backend,” Portugal-based author Shermin Voshmgir said. “It is a complete paradigm shift.” At the same time, companies around the world are working on technology to revolutionise the way we navigate the web. Their vision: Rather than scrolling through websites or apps, people will soon stroll virtually through a three-dimensional version of the internet dubbed the “metaverse” — a digital landscape of sorts where users can work, buy things or meet their friends, and where physical and digital realities converge. “It will be a walk-in internet, so to speak,” said Constanze Osei, who leads the society and innovation policy efforts for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at US tech giant Meta, formerly known as Facebook.

But as companies like hers pour billions into developing that next generation of the internet, digital rights activists caution that the firms will eventually want to cash in on their investment — and that this could thwart efforts to give users more power over their digital selves. “The metaverse could become the most invasive surveillance system ever created,” said Micaela Mantegna, an Argentinian lawyer and digital rights researcher. To understand where the next generation of the internet could go wrong, it helps to look at how we got here. As early as the 1960s, researchers began connecting computers around the world. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that the invention of the world-wide-web and web browsers made the network available to anyone who was able to afford an internet connection. Since then, the web has upended every aspect of society, from the way people do business to how they find information or interact with each other. “Everything has changed because of the internet,” said Miriam Meckel, CEO of ada and professor of corporate communications at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. “And the internet itself has changed, as well.”

During the web’s first phase, people browsed the web from their desktop computers and navigated it mainly via search engines. That changed in the 2000s with the emergence of social media and mobile internet, giving rise to the online world as we know it today.

At the core of this “web2,” there are online platforms such as Meta’s Facebook and Instagram or, more recently, messaging services like Telegram. Those platforms have helped dissidents in authoritarian regimes organize protests or give marginalised groups a voice. But revelations such as the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal have shown that they are also used to spread hate, amplify disinformation and sway democratic elections.

Meanwhile, a small number of Big Tech companies like Meta or Google’s parent company Alphabet have come to dominate their respective segments of the internet economy. To shift power back to individuals and communities, people like author Shermin Voshmgir have proposed rebuilding the web with decentralised public blockchains — databases that are searchable by everyone and shared on computers around the world. Such a “web3” would be collectively controlled by users rather than a few powerful gatekeepers, the idea goes — making it easier, for example, for creatives to make money with the work they publish online.

This article was provided by Deutsche Welle