Web3? Right; a decentralized web. Cool idea, kind of reminds me of the semantic web. Not getting anywhere anytime soon due to the inertia of the existing web. I'm kind of waiting for the revolution where people demand to own their information, as it makes more sense and could protect against all sorts of abuse, but I'm not holding my breath.
On the one side there are people obsessing about ownership and monetization. They want to buy and sell digital things for profit. They want to create pay to win systems where you have to spend money to have tokens to access services.
On the other side you have the altruistic, open access web3 that is focused on decentralization and breaking down walled gardens. For example IPFS is the peer to peer network for hosting and fetching content, resistant to censorship. It is probably the closest thing to old days of web where there was an ethos of open access to data.
The "for profit" crowd is trying to create an artificial decentralized monetization system on top of the fundamentally free, decentralized, peer to peer stuff like IPFS. For example if I host something in IPFS then there is nothing stopping folks from accessing it from any peer that has a copy. There is free and open exchange of data. But if I have an NFT then I can claim that I "own" something that is hosted in the distributed, decentralized IPFS. Some people are going so far as to say that they want NFT's to be used to implement a form of DRM on top of the peer to peer decentralized tech that would otherwise be freely exchanging data.
Personally I see web3 as the underlying decentralized tech like IPFS and ENS, but the NFT monetization and speculation side of things is a toxic casino and monetization layer bolted on top and it will probably harm the ecosystem of actual open decentralized tech underneath.
Laws and law enforcement. We should demand our governments to make laws that make unauthorized (by the people themselves through a decentralized system) use of our data illegal. At least the more flagrant/large scale forms of abuse could be prevented that way.
Exactly – this is currently a regulatory problem, and blockchains, decentralized identity, etc. won't solve anything in this space. On the contrary, it will by definition enable identification in some types of data.
This makes me conclude that these types of solutions are really more about portability and making some sort of political point (the only thing users realistically control is first party authorization – nothing else); They certainly don't have any security or privacy-related guarantees.
