Completing the Migration to Web 3 by the Tomi Team

Web3 technology represents a new era where the internet will provide true freedom of speech, global communications, and increased prosperity for all! Wait. Haven’t we heard that before? And haven’t we just witnessed an unprecedented series of pump-and-dump schemes, overpriced jpgs, and regulatory scandals?

Well,  yes. Every new technology comes with its early movers, early failures, and hype cycles, but there’s something new about Web3 and even the scandals and sensitive regulatory environment point to the reasons why this technology has the potential to bring a monumental shift to the global economy.

New technology, particularly software technology, strikes at the world’s largest inefficiencies. All of us have seen astonishing progress in our lifetimes in terms of changes in business practices, medical technology, communications capabilities, transportation, and energy. Where haven’t we seen much progress? Public infrastructure, governance, and finance.

As a result, Web3 is creating major disruptions in these areas, but we haven’t yet seen the results most people want—public infrastructure that is governed by the public.

The World Wide Web is a public infrastructure, yet it has evolved with very little pre-planning of how this infrastructure should be governed and financed.

So let’s take a step back. How did we get to where we are with Web2 and what might we do differently for Web3?

Web 1: Where It All Started

The World Wide Web, also known as the “read-only web” launched in 1989, allowing publishers to create websites and people to search for websites. The content wasn’t interactive, and there was very little user-generated content in web form. Prior to that, online computer bulletin boards (BBS) had been in place since 1978, and in 1994 evolved to forums which were popular among technology buffs until the web became available and other means of interaction took over.

Web 2: Where We Are Today

During the late 1990s, a number of websites began to integrate forum-type user-generated content, creating interactive websites. One of the first such sites was Slashdot.org, established in 1997 as a “News for Nerds” site which curates tech news and allows threaded debate, curated by the community through rotating moderation capabilities.

Web 2.0 leveraged the capability to have users interact with one another. User-generated content networks, peer-to-peer marketplaces, and other types of platforms emerged, creating the infrastructure for content, rather than the content itself. Platforms such as Twitter and Google don’t create their own content, and AirBnB owns no hotel rooms.

Social media platforms flourished, as YouTube, Facebook, and YouTube were able to leverage the general populace’s labor in creating unlimited amounts of content for one another. Features such as sharing, liking, and commenting allowed social media platforms to grow incrementally, providing information and entertainment globally.

The promise of Web2 was the end of censorship, the ability to spread and share ideas globally, and an increased level of freedom for everyone in the world. With global communications, it was thought, humans would break down the barriers and borders, create greater levels of peace and understanding, and more people would thrive from global business opportunities. And while generally, the internet has created more prosperity on earth, the system did not create the freedom or expression that was originally envisioned. Large corporates dominate the internet, advertising interests degrade the web experience, people’s data is exploited, and in some areas of the world, governments are able to control and throttle people’s access to the internet.

Web3: Liberation and Freedom

Web3 is being enabled through the blockchain, which provides a couple of innovations that allow privacy and freedom at new levels, as well as enablement of business models never before available. First and foremost is the ability of cryptocurrency to allow micropayments and business models that reward people for their data and their time. Web3 projects include rewarding content providers directly instead of through advertisers, attention tokens that reward people for watching advertisements, and micropayments that allow game companies to eliminate advertising from their games.

Furthermore, Web3 is enabling new types of self-custodianship of their digital goods, creations, and digital cash. Consensus mechanisms are able to validate the provenance and origin of goods and attestations, providing people the ability to vouch for one another and provide proofs that are not reliant on governments, banks and other centralized authorities. This type of peer-to-peer truth generation can enable free speech, free transactions, and freedom of association.

The final piece of the puzzle is the emergence of self-sovereign identity solutions based on immutable ledgers, allowing people to take back the possession of their data, control how their information is used, and identify themselves the way they want to across multiple web locations.

Tomi Enabling the Web3 Infrastructure

Unfortunately, as the crypto industry has learned, you can’t just put a layer on top of Web2 and enable the functionality of Web3. What’s needed is the replacement of the ICANN DNS infrastructure with a DAO structure to manage domain names, independent identity providers that enable people to manage their own data, and encryption-by-default of all traffic, so people can have complete privacy and freedom to interact with whoever they want, wherever they want in the world.

Tomi is providing these key elements and the ability for anyone to create better tools. The Tomi browser is based on open source code which anyone can reproduce to create a Tomi-compatible browser. The Tomi identity solutions will be based on W3C standards and anyone can produce an SSI wallet that interacts with the systems in place.

Of course, total freedom gives a wide berth to crime and illicit activities, which makes the internet unsafe. The Darknet emerged out of this total freedom, and Tomi has no intention of replicating that kind of over permissive environment. But… the moderation and regulation of content will not be in Tomi’s hands, but enabled by a DAO that allows the people of the web to police the web. No more centralized authorities or benevolent dictators. Tomi is created by Free Birds, along with you, participants in this new evolution of the web by the people, for the people.