The Web hasn't been free ever since Web2. I've written about this in CoinTelegraph[1] and CoinDesk[2], etc. We live in digital Feudalism (https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/) where early adopters and VCs prop up and dump private stocks on the public (remember SoftBank and WeWork for instance?) to make a fortune, and the public proceeds to exert pressure on the companies to extract rents forever. The Web2 companies are run top-down with an iron fist. Zuck and Elon own our public forums, for instance. Web3 just decentralized the grift, but it did so on a technology (blockchain) which is about the only one in the world that promises to be slower and more expensive with time.
Crypto has been around for 10 years and it hasn't gone mainstream. There are several reasons for that, and they ALL need to be fixed before it can be adopted by people and have real utility. (Some crypto does, such as FileCoin, but it's few and far between.)
Whether that's done with tokens or not, is a separate story. But we have to move past scarcity, as Albert Wenger says in https://worldaftercapital.org . I propose to coin the term Web4.
Crypto has been around for 10 years and it hasn't gone mainstream. There are several reasons for that, and they ALL need to be fixed before it can be adopted by people and have real utility. (Some crypto does, such as FileCoin, but it's few and far between.)
Here is what needs to be done: https://intercoin.org/proposal.pdf
Whether that's done with tokens or not, is a separate story. But we have to move past scarcity, as Albert Wenger says in https://worldaftercapital.org . I propose to coin the term Web4.
1. https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...
2. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block...