Literally in recent days, two significant events have occurred: The British Interior Ministry allowed the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States, and Telegram introduced a paid subscription. How are these events related and what are they talking about? This shows that the golden age of web 2.0 as a space of freedom is naturally coming to an end. On the one hand, the state is leading the offensive: Julian Assange created his own Wikipedia, Wikileaks, a resource that was dedicated to the main value of freedom of speech — the ability of people to expose the abuses of the powerful: states and corporations. As a result, for such revelations, he found himself persecuted by the most powerful state on earth — the United States. American prosecutors have not forgiven him for helping Chelsea Manning in leaking data on war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the other hand, a new turn in the development of Telegram. In itself, the appearance of a paid subscription, except for its strangely high price (at first it was announced 449rubles per month, almost immediately it fell to 299rubles), there seems to be nothing: the old features remain in place, and the fee is introduced for new advanced features. Although, of course, there were immediately fears that for the free Telegram, this means a gradual halt in development: it will, of course, be updated and supported, but really new, useful and expected features (like transcribing voice messages into text) will become the prerogative of the already paid version. For many, this was the end of the era of free and at the same time advanced — probably the most advanced in the world — messenger.

But the main thing here is not the fate of a particular messenger, but the reality that these changes reflect. Of course, it would be naive to expect that it will always be free. But the era of web 2.0 consisted of these naive expectations — that technological progress itself, technologies, would provide people with freedom and independence. Such technological communism, when, thanks to technology, everything will be better tomorrow than yesterday — and, at the same time, cheaper or completely free. And for the time being, it worked: Uber made trips cheaper, you can Google for free, technologies grew and developed, competing with each other, without shifting their costs to users. And everything was fine, Google followed the principle of Don't be evil, and Telegram was free and free.

This era is over. In 2018, Google quietly abandoned the principle of Don't be evil, and Telegram first became more compromise with the authorities, and now it has become commercialized. All this became known to users after the fact. Why? Because they don't make decisions in it. 700 million people use Telegram, and one or several people decide — it is not so important even how decisions are made in Telegram, personally by Pavel Durov or by some circle of investors. It is important that the key problem of web 2.0 turned out to be that the circles of shareholders — those who control decision—making, and stakeholders — those they influence - do not coincide at all.

Shareholders — owners, large investors — who in total control 51% of the votes and more — are, as a rule, several tens or hundreds of people. Often these are institutionalized investors — that is, other corporations. Stakeholders — users of services — are millions and billions of people. The imbalance is thousands, if not millions, of times. In the heyday of web 2.0, this was not a problem — while companies were fighting for the user with each other, they looked like an ally of the average user.

But now, when the competition has already been won by many, there are no small players left, the Internet is divided between giants operating with at least tens of millions — and up to several billion — users, and the "enslavement" of users into ecosystems has begun, this romantic time — when the interests of services coincided with the interests of users — is over. Now the interests of the services have become to recoup the huge investments made in them, to return their investments to investors with a profit. And how they will do it — they will decide for themselves, without the participation of users, but by a narrow circle of those who own these services and who earn money from them.

Therefore, it is not so important that the free Telegram has not become worse with the advent of the paid version. It is important that this decision, like all previous and all future ones, was made by Telegram for users: they were simply confronted with the fact. Now it is already 700 million people. So far, these decisions remain tolerable, and there seems to be nothing to complain about, but the fact itself is already beginning to bother many. Because there are examples of how services that have survived the "flower-bouquet period" of attracting users at the expense of investors, having established relationships with them, began to present bills: you have to pay for everything, and it is also desirable not to go to another — the transition from ecosystem to ecosystem, platform to platform, is becoming more difficult and more expensive for yourself.

All this forms a request and a technical task for Web 3.0.

Why do I need web 3.0?

First, Web 3.0 should solve the same task that web 2.0 solved: to allow people to exchange information, cooperate and trade directly around the world, freely and independently of the state. Web 2.0 coped with this task only for the time being — then regulators came, and not only in Russia, but all over the world. And the example of Assange: whom the liberal UK is going to extradite to the United States, where freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, persecuting him for publicizing war crimes in the country — another science.

Secondly, web 2.0 turned out to be vulnerable to monopolization. The users who form its basis do not solve anything in it. Their last freedom is the freedom to choose between a decreasing number of competitors who have taken over almost the entire space in all important areas: search, content, services, finance, etc.

This makes up the technical specification for Web 3.0:

encryption — any contact between users must be protected from and to a completely different level from control, wiretapping and tracking by even the most advanced special services.
decentralization — users of services and platforms themselves must determine their development, make decisions and provide them with resources.

Now a new generation of future services, platforms that will make up web 3.0, is just emerging. There are several of them: Utopia, Y messenger, Keybase and TOR. The purpose of all these services is to protect and secure users' contacts with each other.

The most multifunctional system among them is Utopia. Y messenger is a messenger that is created to be secure, but at the same time convenient like Telegram or WhatsApp.

Blockchain startup Keybase created a cryptographically secure file storage. And in 2020, Zoom bought it, and Keybase specialists started improving the security of the service.

Well, the well-known Tor is only a browser offering encryption and anonymization of traffic. Utopia is a platform for full—fledged interaction between people, including communication and payments. Thus, in Utopia, people can not only communicate, but also collaborate, create different projects, collaborate, and build businesses in as secure and secure a mode as they need.

With Utopia, users can exchange instant text and voice messages, transfer files, create group chats, channels and news feeds, as well as organize private discussions. A geometry can be linked to the channel using uMaps, which facilitates access via Utopia channels and provides an additional level of security. This makes it possible not to use public mapping services, which, as is known, collect data to replenish Big Data arrays.

uMail is a decentralized alternative to classic email. Servers do not participate in the transmission and storage of emails. The uMail account, which can be created in a minute, provides the opportunity to use an unlimited number of messages and a place to store attached files. The encryption used by the Utopia ecosystem guarantees the security of mail transmission and storage. The uMail account, which is an integral part of Utopia, cannot be blocked or hijacked.

All financial instruments are available in the uWallet wallet built into Utopia: send and accept instant payments in the Crypton cryptocurrency, which is used in Utopia, extract currency, accept payments on your website, pay for Crypto cards without revealing your identity, or bill for your services to other Utopia users. Among other functions, it is necessary to mention the API and the console client for convenience and ease of integration.

The Utopia network includes a secure alternative to the traditional Domain Name System (DNS) – the Utopia Name System (uNS). It is a decentralized registry of names that cannot be captured, frozen or damaged. After registration, they will remain yours forever. uNS, together with the packet forwarding function, allow you to organize tunneling of any data between users of the ecosystem and store different types of resources, including websites, in the Utopia network.

There are many other awesome features available that you will love, such as voice call encryption, tons of stickers and emoticons, multiplayer games, collaboration and organization tools. This is a full—fledged prototype of Web 3.0. Whether Utopia will become the future of the Internet or not is up to users to decide.

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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/672692/

Tags: assessment , forecasts

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