Is blockchain needed to evolve the Internet into a web3-based version? World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee says no. Smartmesh founder Henry Wang hopes to change his mind.

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There is general consensus that the Internet is broken. Blockchain technology is seen as the catalyst for returning data ownership and control to the people, and by extension breaking the stranglehold of the Internet billionaires once and for all. To achieve this, computer scientists in this space need to be on the same page. At the moment, they are not. Henry Wang hopes to change this. 

In the pursuit of building the new Internet, referred to as web3, not everybody agrees that blockchain technology is the critical component. In fact, the main antagonist is none other than the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Computer scientist Henry Wang is hoping that his advocacy DAO, the World Web3 Alliance, can change Berners-Lee’s views on blockchain and provide a united way forward to solve the data issue and build the value Internet of the future. 

 Data ownership is the holy grail. 

It took me weeks to understand what Henry Wang was talking about. That is because Henry Wang is a computer scientist. For decades he has been experimenting with technology that I take for granted. For this article I really needed to understand the fundamentals of data. 

A web3 OG, Wang’s eyes light up when he talks about how decentralized technology can connect and empower marginalized communities with access to finance, education and communication. His journey is one in pursuit of connection, or as he describes it, One World One Web. How data is presented, connected and distributed – and who in fact owns it – is key to how the future Internet will look and who profits from it. In web3, it should be we, the people, that own and profit from our own data. 

In an open letter published online in 2018, Berners-Lee conceded that his original vision for the world wide web did not eventuate. He acknowledged that the web had become a place of inequity, run by a handful of tech giants that took our data and used it for their own commercial gains. To solve this, he built Solid (Social Links The Data) in conjunction with MIT to return the power of data to the people.

Berners-Lee refers to Solid as the Third Layer of the Internet that “is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data Principles,” according to its website. Although open source and decentralized, it does not use blockchain technology. Berners-Lee has been an open critic of the crypto-based web3, which makes all data transparent and is clunky when it comes to updating data across the blockchain. Solid essentially lets you store your data in your own secure, private server, called a Pod, and then set permissions to give tech companies and government services access to your data on your terms.

“Tim Berners-Lee does not like crypto,” Wang told me. “His project Solid has no blockchain or crypto incentivization, so it’s very hard for mass adoption. We know that for the Value Internet era, blockchain and crypto is inevitable. You can hardly incentivize people to move from Facebook or Twitter without crypto incentivization.” 

Wang is the founder and CEO of SmartMesh, a blockchain-based Value Internet underlying protocol that enables smart devices to connect with each other even without Internet or telecom services. This is achieved by building peer-to-peer (P2P) mesh networks that use devices called MeshBoxes that act as nodes and run in parallel to the Internet. 

He is also the founder of the World Wed3 Alliance (W3A), a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that “develops the real world Web 3.0 (web3) protocols to support and facilitate the building of the next-gen world wide web,” according to its mission statement. Wang is hoping that MetaLife, one such web3 decentralized social network protocol, can become the vehicle for showing Berners-Lee how Solid can integrate with blockchain-based social applications, thereby paving the way for the unification of web3 and web3.0. 

So what’s the difference between Web 3.0 and web3? Good question, and to answer it we need a bit of history.

In 2000, Berners-Lee used the term Semantic Web to describe how he saw the next generation of the World Wide Web - as a web of data. As Wang explained, “but that name was a difficult one for the public. So in 2006, three years after I coined Web3.0, Berners-Lee adopted Web3.0 for the Semantic Web.”

Read more: Alchemy Answers Moxie web3 Critique with Point About Data

Wang draws the distinction between the term Web3.0 and web3 as Web3.0 being focused on data ownership and data application separation, whereas web3 has focused more on blockchain and crypto. The goal of the World Web3 Alliance is to unify Web3.0 and web3 with the same meaning. The current global web3 camp is divided into blockchain-less Web3.0, led by Berners-Lee at one end, and the blockchain-crypto web3 as conceived by Ethereum co-founder and Web3 Foundation founder Gavin Wood at the other end. 

“Both Web3.0 and web3 exist to disrupt the monopoly of Web2.0 and return the Internet to the people,” Wang said. “The original intention of Web3.0 was to separate the data from the application.” To return to the original Web3.0 vision blockchain is needed “as a value transport layer for the Value Internet Protocol,” he said.

Then there is Wang’s mission to bring the Internet to the vast parts of the world where it is currently unavailable. According to Hootsuite and We Are Social’s 2022 Digital Snapshot, as of April 2022 there are still 2.9 billion people who do not use the Internet, or 37 percent of the global population.

In South East Asia, a region of disparate economies and huge populations where stable power supply and high speed Internet access is still largely unaffordable and unreliable – and also regularly succumbs to floods, earthquakes and typhoons – SmartMesh is a solution with a lot of promise.  “Southeast Asian countries will be the place for massive adoption of web3, because they don't have those dominant players to stop them from success at scale,” Wang said. “This is a chance for them to leapfrog in the country's economy.” 

In a tie-up, the SmartMesh system using MeshBox has already been deployed at the Singapore University of Social Science (SUSS) to turn the campus into its own interconnected network on the blockchain, called Sunshine Blockchain Living Lab. 

“We are building an ecosystem of solutions to get people in emerging countries connected to the decentralized economy,” he said. “We talk about financial inclusion in web3, yet huge numbers in these populations do not even have access to the Internet, so how can blockchain even reach them? So our solution starts with access to blockchain that does not require access to the Internet first. That is what SmartMesh and the MeshBox does. And then MetaLife provides the web3 applications that sit on top of it.”

He added, “we need to unify web3 and web3.0 to truly bring in the new era of the Value Internet. When you build decentralized social networks, you need a blockchain and token incentive to help people migrate from web2 to web3. Web3 provides a way for users to monetize their own data. It is like a Universal Basic Income (UBI). This will ultimately reduce the gap between the poor and the wealthy.”