Is Web 3.0 Dead? | a16z Chris Dixon | EO

[upbeat music] So when the internet started in the nineties, most internet services were what we call kind of the technologies, technologists call read-only, meaning you'd go to a website, and you'd consume information.

And back then they kind of looked like magazines or brochures, and for the most part, you didn't have things like social media in the nineties.

And then there was a movement called, at the time, in the, in the two thousands, I was part of this movement, it was called Web two.

It was also called the Read/Write movement.

It was...

there were conferences called the Read/Write conferences.

There were blogs called Read/Write, Read/Write Web and things.

The con- kind of the motivating concept behind that movement was the internet can be more than it is today.

It can be more than sort of a passive consumption, consumptive medium.

And, and specifically what that meant is we can build social media, what we call social media today.

So we can build websites and services where instead of you just going and reading content that an editor wrote, you can submit content.

So you can build Facebook and Twitter, where you can post content and read that content, right? That was the Web two movement.

It was about making the internet a full kind of participatory medium, allowing people to not only read, i.e. consume information, but also write, i.e. publish information.

That's not my idea.

That's an old concept.

The Read/Write Web was a widespread term in the two thousands.

The most important internet services are networks.

So if you think about Facebook and Uber and WhatsApp, these are networks, and a network means they're services that connect people together.

And networks have what are called network effects, which means that the more people that use them, the more valuable they get.

And one consequence of that is that as some of these services have gotten very big, um, they've gotten very, very powerful.

As a result, I think we're at a serious risk right now of, uh, ending up with an internet that is really just sort of four or five large internet companies, like Google and Amazon and Apple and Facebook and so forth, which I think would be a bad outcome for startups and for society more generally.

The promise of the internet initially was to be a decentralized network that returned power and money to the users of the network instead of sort of central intermediaries the way that prior media industries looked.

If you think about, you know, at least in the United States, like TV and radio and all the other kind of media businesses were very centralized.

There were a few big channels that kind of controlled everything, controlled all the money, and the internet, when I got involved, and I think a lot of people in the nineties got involved, it w- what was very exciting about it, it, it would shift the money flow and the power back to the edges of the network.

And that, and I think that happened for somewhat for the nineties, but then in the, in the two thousands, a lot of that kind of started to reconsolidate.

[upbeat music] So when the internet started in the nineties, most internet services were what we call kind of the technologies, technologists call read-only, meaning you'd go to a website, and you'd consume information.

And back then they kind of looked like magazines or brochures, and for the most part, you didn't have things like social media in the nineties.

And then there was a movement called, at the time, in the, in the two thousands, I was part of this movement, it was called Web two.

It was also called the Read/Write movement.

It was...

there were conferences called the Read/Write conferences.

There were blogs called Read/Write, Read/Write Web and things.

The con- kind of the motivating concept behind that movement was the internet can be more than it is today.

It can be more than sort of a passive consumption, consumptive medium.

And, and specifically what that meant is we can build social media, what we call social media today.

So we can build websites and services where instead of you just going and reading content that an editor wrote, you can submit content.

So you can build Facebook and Twitter, where you can post content and read that content, right? That was the Web two movement.

It was about making the internet a full kind of participatory medium, allowing people to not only read, i.e. consume information, but also write, i.e. publish information.

That's not my idea.

That's an old concept.

The Read/Write Web was a widespread term in the two thousands.

The most important internet services are networks.

So if you think about Facebook and Uber and WhatsApp, these are networks, and a network means they're services that connect people together.

And networks have what are called network effects, which means that the more people that use them, the more valuable they get.

And one consequence of that is that as some of these services have gotten very big, um, they've gotten very, very powerful.

As a result, I think we're at a serious risk right now of, uh, ending up with an internet that is really just sort of four or five large internet companies, like Google and Amazon and Apple and Facebook and so forth, which I think would be a bad outcome for startups and for society more generally.

The promise of the internet initially was to be a decentralized network that returned power and money to the users of the network instead of sort of central intermediaries the way that prior media industries looked.

If you think about, you know, at least in the United States, like TV and radio and all the other kind of media businesses were very centralized.

There were a few big channels that kind of controlled everything, controlled all the money, and the internet, when I got involved, and I think a lot of people in the nineties got involved, it w- what was very exciting about it, it, it would shift the money flow and the power back to the edges of the network.

And that, and I think that happened for somewhat for the nineties, but then in the, in the two thousands, a lot of that kind of started to reconsolidate.