The first web pages begin to appear. At first they are of limited general appeal, but the system has become a reality.
The web's transition to the mainstream is helped by the appearance of Mosaic, an intuitive, user-friendly browser, in 1993, and then a year later by Netscape Navigator, which attains an 80% share of web browser usage by 1996.
Internet Explorer 3.0 is provided free of charge with Windows 95, a practice known as 'bundling' that later brings Microsoft to the attention of anti-monopoly bodies in the US and EU. With its massive market dominance and tendency to favour Microsoft's own applications such as Media Player, there comes a de facto influence on emerging web technologies; if it doesn't work on IE, it doesn't work for most users. The web is at risk of becoming a proprietary technology.
Before Google, sites such as Yahoo! created searchable directories of websites, but Google's focus on technology and indexing gives the impression that it is a gateway to the whole web.
Blogging emerged in the mid-1990s but the launch of Open Diary
in 1998 is a watershed because it is the first significant
platform to encourage reader responses or comments on individual
blogposts.
Monica Lewinsky
When the Drudge Report, a gossipy news blog, breaks the story on
17 January of then US president Bill Clinton's relationship with
Monica Lewinsky, its headline is "Newsweek kills story on White
House intern", reflecting the impotence of offline media to
control the news agenda in an online world.
Wikipedia is founded as a "multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia", to which anyone can contribute, and which anyone can access. By 2014 the English-language version has about 4.5million entries.
The Chinese government begins to pursue several initiatives to counter the potentially subversive influence of the open web, including this system of web filters that allows the authorities to block individual web pages, whole websites, or any page referencing a particular term.
The site, which only becomes generally accessible in 2006, helps millions of people become more active online but is not on the open web as many of its pages, for good reasons, are only accessible to signed-in users.
The iPhone, like Facebook, is another innovation that makes many people more active online, but at the same time draws them away from the open web, in this case into Apple's app ecosystem. Apps are small applications that may use the internet, or even web protocols, but are not usually web browsers.
Google releases a suite of products including a freeware browser called Chrome, and an operating system that consists of the Chrome browser plus a set of web-based applications to replace traditional, locally installed software.
In April, WikiLeaks makes the first release from the cache of documents it has received from Bradley Manning which includes video footage of a US army helicopter firing on civilians. Later that year, the US embassy cables make public a vast trove of diplomatic memos.
The US government responds to the WikiLeaks revelations by issuing subpoenas to Twitter and Google to reveal what they know about users suspected of involvement. Twitter reacts by informing the users. Elsewhere, a number of companies withdraw their services from WikiLeaks, including Visa, Paypal and Apple, which removes a WikiLeaks app from its store.
The Stop Online Piracy act (Sopa) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) are two pieces of proposed US legislation that their proponents claim will protect copyright owners. Others say the effect will be web censorship. Wikipedia takes the threat so seriously that it goes on strike for a day. Both bills falter.
Terminology Web3 is distinct from Tim Berners-Lee's 1999 concept
for a semantic web.[18] In 2006, Berners-Lee described the
semantic web as a component of Web 3.0, which is different than
the term Web3 in crypto context. The term "Web3" was coined by
Polkadot founder and Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014,
referring to a "decentralized online ecosystem based on
blockchain." In 2021, the idea of Web3 gained popularity.
Particular interest spiked toward the end of 2021, largely due
to interest from cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investments from
high-profile technologists and companies.[6][7] Executives from
venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz traveled to Washington,
D.C. in October 2021 to lobby for the idea as a potential
solution to questions about regulation of the web, with which
policymakers have been grappling. Some writers referring to the
decentralized concept usually known as "Web3" have used the term
"Web 3.0", leading to some confusion between the two
concepts.Furthermore, some visions of Web3 also incorporate
ideas relating to the semantic web
Concept
Specific visions for Web3 differ, and the term has been
described by Bloomberg as "hazy", but they revolve around the
idea of decentralization and often incorporate blockchain
technologies, such as various cryptocurrencies and non-fungible
tokens (NFTs). Bloomberg has described Web3 as an idea that
"would build financial assets, in the form of tokens, into the
inner workings of almost anything you do online". Some visions
are based around the concept of decentralized autonomous
organizations (DAOs). Decentralized finance (DeFi) is another
key concept; in it, users exchange currency without bank or
government involvement. Self-sovereign identity allows users to
identify themselves without relying on an authentication system
such as OAuth, in which a trusted party has to be reached in
order to assess identity. Technology scholars have argued that
Web3 would likely run in tandem with Web 2.0 sites, with Web 2.0
sites likely adopting Web3 technologies in order to keep their
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