The Semantic Filter on Online Subjugation: Web 3.0 and its Implications on Digital Colonialism

*Aklovya Panwar and Vatsalya Vishal

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. − Albert Einstein

The quote could not have gained a better meaning than what it has in the cyber world. The Merriam-Webster defines cyberspace simply as an “online world of the computer network and the Internet. However, with time, this has become much more than that. It has, for all practical purposes, become a world in itself, which in many ways, is perceived as more real than the offline world which is passed off as reality. The internet started as a simple tool for information sharing. Since then, it has become a defining tool for society. It has become a platform for the public at large to reflect their sentiments; it has become a synonym of freedom of expression, it has become a source of entertainment, a source of debate, discussion, sharing and more so, a tool for shaping public sentiments.

It is with this aspect; problems arise which the authors intend to inspect. There have been multiple instances in past where the powerful companies or the governments have used the internet for their benefit, and in that, the public interest was disregarded outrightly. The Internet has been used as a tool for surveillance on masses, or as a tool to propagate any agenda to the public at large which have been grossly misleading. Most importantly, the internet in modern day world is being used as a tool to create a hegemony by the dominant and capable forces over the minorities. This phenomenon is often referred to as the Digital Colonialism.

Despite being a terribly important issue in the cyber world, which has a severe impact on worldwide economic, social and cultural growth of the backward areas of the world instead, the issue of digital colonialism is surprisingly less talked about. Recently, Facebook tried to introduce their version of the internet through their initiative “internet.org” under which they intended to provide customised internet experience to far-flung and backward areas. Though the initiative claimed to provide a tailormade experience of the internet according to the local areas, all the biggest operators that were allowed to be included under the “free basics” were all American companies which drew out the most significant benefits from the initiative.

Ultimately, it was pulled out after it met with some sharp criticism over violating the net neutrality and freedom of expression. However, this is not a lone example. 60% of the content available on the internet is in the English language which is a language spoken by about 10 % of the world population. This shows a cultural hegemony and lack of representation of other languages on the internet. Other than that, there is the issue of data harvesting by big corporations on the Internet without the permission of the user, restrictions on access to knowledge, control on the content development on the internet. All of which are the attributes of digital colonialism.

With time, the internet has seen tremendous development. From being an information sharing tool in the form of ARPANET to a controlled one-way information sharing hub (Web 1.0) the World Wide Web as it was imagined to be in the very beginning, to be an information sharing platform among people (Web 2.0), man’s contribution in developing internet to its current form has been nothing but utterly remarkable. It is the newest development in technology is what has attracted the attention of the authors – Web 3.0.

Tim O’Reilly, who popularised the term Web 2.0, holds web 3.0 is an advancement over the previously existing Web 2.0. There are several significant implications of the technology which differentiates it from the previously existing Web 2.0. From a symbiotic approach that Web 2.0 had in sharing content, Web 3.0 employs a more semantic approach. It also uses technologies like artificial intelligence, 3D graphics and ubiquity to make the internet more accessible and user-friendly to the consumers. The most significant technology change, however, that Web 3.0 has is in the way the internet is delivered to the consumer. Unlike the ISP system that used a single ISP to distribute the internet, Web 3.0, or the semantic web or the new web, uses a decentralised internet system where there is no singular service provider. Hence, the risk of data manipulation and data storage which was ever present in the Web 2.0 is minimalized.


The paper argues that Web 3.0 can be looked upon as a means to combat the threat of Digital Colonialism and for that reason, the development of the technology should be promoted. The paper shall be divided into five parts. Part I dealt with the overview and introduction of the issue. Part II shall elaborate upon the development of the Internet through the ages and shall explain the way through which Web 3.0 has been realised. Part III shall elaborate upon the threats posed digital colonialism and how the previous Web 2.0 only added to the conundrum. Part IV shall examine whether Web 3.0 is a suitable answer to the phenomenon which shall ultimately be followed by the conclusion.

TRAVERSING THROUGH THE AGES: THE EVOLUTION OF INTERNET

Luciano Floridi in his work has stated that the human race is entering into the ‘fourth scientific revolution’ where technology and human life travel side by side and “the process of dislocation and re-examination of humanity’s primary nature” is in progress. When the internet came into existence, various debates arose and still exists as to whether it is just a normal innovation, as anticipated or is there something more to it; or is it safe, if not, then what is at stake, if a lot, then what’s next.


Keeping these questions alive, the web has gone through a revolutionary development. Tim Berner Lee introduced the term in the year 1989 where he speculated the three developmental phases of the World Wide Web (WWW). The first phase, the web of documents or Web 1.0; the second phase, the Web of People or Web 2.0; and third phase which is yet to be realised, the Web of Data or Web 3.0. Throughout its cycle, the WWW has gone through drastic evolutions and revolutions. To understand it further, the difference between three forms of Web can be illustrated as Web 1.0 being static pages of information; Web 2.0 is dynamic pages of information. Web 3.0 would be the senses, brains, and voices of information. However, there is one another less talked form of development in the web which is the symbiotic web or web 2.5. It has been coined by Dr Paul Bernal and can be determined as the form of web used at present. In this, the content providers not only provide information but also extract the data from users.

Web 3.0 was initially described as Web of Documents by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They later describe it as a “Web of Data” with an objective to empower PCs to connect information with the end goal to perform more insightful, semantic errands, for example, progressively making information stores, building vocabularies and composing rules for taking care of information. It is the principal change in how sites are made and how a user collaborates with them. In the most recent computerised revolution, we see the ascent and standardisation of IoT, distributed computing and AI. With each next enormous element, pattern, application and everyday item, we see increasingly joining of virtual assistants who watch the human life, stores information takes in the patterns and helps our day by day life.

SYMBIOTIC WEB AND DIGITAL COLONIZATION

The web 2.5 is a preceding stage of the semantic web where the latter deliberates upon the decentralisation of the internet; the earlier is wholly opposite. In Web 2.5, the users have no control over their data, though the choices are being made for them, not necessarily for their benefit but for the consummation of desires of those who wield that control. This controlling and tailoring of users’ data is an essential characteristic of the present form of a web which dredges up the phenomenon of the Digital Colonialism. The term can be defined as a dominance of the new deployment by data control and computational power. The custodian of which are the imperial power of the global north and its subject are the majority of the global south. There is no explicit consent from these subjects, and still, the phenomenon has successfully manifested itself in rules, designs, languages, cultures and belief systems.

The data so accessed and collected is used for manipulating the people of the global south. The main custodian of this whole data are the big corporations headed by the USA and other first world countries which maintain surveillance in tandem. The Edward Snowden controversy showed how NSA conducts mass surveillance by using people’s data with a program called Prism. There was some disturbing reveals in the report. To add to it, it was contended to be only 1 per cent of the whole information.

Similarly, in the Cambridge Analytica dispute, the information of 87 million users was compromised out of which the data of approximately 562,455 subscribers in India were also impacted. By which it would not be wrong to suggest that the idea of Panopticon proposed by Bentham and celebrated by Michael Foucault as an ‘ideal’ or ‘architectural figure’ of power in modern society, is being used more rigorously and dreadfully. The state of Virtual Panopticon has come into existence where a new set of Regulations in the form of “terms of service” from Facebook, Twitter, etc. are being imposed as some new territories’ jurisdiction.

The problem is further discussed by the works of Bret Weinstein, who states that the deliberations upon the impact of Internet limits itself to censorship and expression, but these are just symptoms. The ‘economic surveillance’ is the real dreadful problem. The level of censorship which the data subjects are facing today would not be possible without the architect of someone having access to the bottomless data pool. This data is used to study how everybody develops their thoughts in private life. Collecting, profiling and analysing these worth of private data has enabled these corporation to figure out exactly how and what users think in real time and even predict our future behaviour with nearly perfect autonomy. This turns citizens of the global south into a commodity to be exploited.

In this new form of colonisation, the primary target of the first world countries is the ‘online economic sphere.’ They do it by establishing their models of business and alluring the users to purchase western products. These corporations harvest the data of global citizens without their knowledge and use it to manipulate their choices. The lack of online regulations leads to the formation of gigantic monopolies of Global North like Google and Facebook (broadly, the Silicon Valley) which uses the data of citizens of southern countries to profit themselves. Now users are used as “mere products of sale” to the advertising agencies. It is to be noted that users of who live in Europe, including the UK, worth one-third of a North American to Facebook, at $4.50 every three months, while the “rest of the world”, which includes most developing nations are only worth $1.22 per user.

Similarly, the loss of revenue to the government of third world countries happens due to tax evasions by these first world corporations. They earn revenue by selling their product to the global south, but they give tax from that revenue to the government of the global north. For example, eBay and Amazon pay their taxes on their transactions in the US, irrespective of whether a transaction has taken place entirely between two global south-based citizens. Subsequent target in this colonialism is the knowledge of the users, the content created by the third world countries is proportionally low. Sub-Saharan Africa only registers 0.7% of the world domain. The Global North (first world nations) makes the most extreme content on the web and in this way controls the knowledge of the subjects from third worlds.

By far most of the knowledge on Wikipedia expounded on most African nations is composed or generated by (basically male) editors in Europe or North America. Be that as it may, there are just 52,000 articles in the Bengali Wikipedia (a dialect talked by 237 million individuals), while the Dutch Wikipedia has about 2 million articles for a nation whose dialect is talked by 28 million individuals. For instance, in the worldwide “Wikipedia Editor Survey 2011” of all the Wikipedia’s, it was studied that the highest number of editors are from US (20%), followed by Germany (12%) and Russia (7%). All these countries are from Global North, and the holders of maximum content and the internet allows them to control a large proportion of the discourse thereby favouring the first world and elite classes. It creates scepticism over the source of information and creates a negative impact on the diversity of sources of both the online and offline spaces.

THE CONSEQUENCE OF THE SYMBIOTIC WEB: BIRTH OF WEB 3.0 AND ITS IMPACT ON DIGITAL COLONIALISM

The previous section specified a multitude of ways in which digital colonialism is affecting society. One of the biggest reasons why these problems persist is that in the modern diaspora, one kind of freedom – ‘liber’ freedom is sacrificed for another, more materialistic ‘gratis’ freedom wherein the user does not pay for the services provided in a strict pecuniary sense. However, the payment is through the compromise in the data which is shared, which ultimately results in the demise of the personal autonomy of the user. Giving such immense power to some companies is the biggest reason digital colonialism is becoming a dangerous phenomenon.

Due to these issues, the introduction of Web 3.0 becomes relevant. Web 3.0 unwittingly answers the significant effects of digital colonialism in quite a practical way. Like Blockchain, the new web is based on a decentralised system of the network which does not allow the data to be stored in a singular place. This prevents the dominant players to have full control over the content and enables the small players to enter into the competition. Hence, the question of virtual panopticons is ruled out. Also, since the data is not stored at a single place, conducting surveillance and using user content for data mining purposes also becomes difficult since the perpetrators working under this technology will never have full access to every information that is there. This indirectly ensured the privacy of the user as well since it. The advent of web 3.0 has given a breath of relief to the Privacy Proponents.

As in the decentralised internet, the privacy concerns are lesser than the present form of a colonised web. There are various efforts put to reach this new revolution, and one of the primitive technologies of the Web 3.0 is Blockchain. It is a decentralised cryptocurrency platform which shares all part of its data using the semantic web framework. These blockchain which is powered by the smart contract are the genesis of the various artificial intelligent agents with reasoning abilities. It is a new paradigm used for the decentralised cryptocurrencies system and an instrument for the Financial Technology Industry. The blockchain is still at its primary stage, and the Initial Revolutionary project it undertakes is Bitcoin. While the bitcoin was a successful financial transaction system, this technology is still developing and proves to be more than just cryptocurrency. These platforms will enable plenty of third-party projects that among other things require the use of standards for data exchange.

Subsequently, Cryptocurrency and blockchain stages are endeavouring to wind up the decentralised protocols of the following emphasis of the web, “web 3.0.” Unlike the old web protocols, which are by and large kept up by developers at no expense (or by huge tech organisations), decentralised protocols layer developers are boosted to keep up and upgrade these protocols. This is incredible for the web 3.0 individual client, whose motivating forces are more lined up with the developers than the site or application proprietor. In this manner, we are moving toward a more significant amount of the production of a Semantic Blockchain.

TOWARDS THE NEW APPROACH

The fantasy of semantic web engulfs a startling reality. The main feature of Web 3.0 technologies is to create an environment of collaborative and autonomous incorporation of data on the internet. The autonomy of this machine communication and robust creation of information is in need of a severe evaluation when seen from a semantic lens. The evolution of the web from one stage to the another, increase the risks as well. As the susceptibility of the web gets inherited by the succeeding web, and it is applicable in stages from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. In this simulation the dreary questions which were left unanswered in the second generation of Web such as how browsing in Web 3.0 platform will change the dynamics of monitoring on a person in real time and absolute details, where all of the data will go, who would be the owner of that data or what would be private and what would be public, what would be modifiable and revocable, still exists.

These questions will remain constant since the answers to them can never be verified. Thus, the actual deliberation of a nation for forming a policy over this third generation of the web should be on the security risks of these new technologies and their interaction with each other. Other questions which should be raised are present data classification and privilege procedures and strategies in the private sector and government adequate? Are present security shields and countermeasures going to be powerful later on or do we have to devise new ones before technology changes? Is present enactment encompassing computer crimes adequate as we go ahead or do we have to think about new definitions?

For instance, blockchain technology is based upon the Semantic Platform and thus customised to provide more control to its users. However, the decentralisation feature of this technology will make it difficult to navigate the regulatory landscape which may create a problem in determining the controller/processor; determining the location and jurisdiction of decentralised data; the ability to respond to subject access requests, or deleting or changing personal information on the blockchain.

Moreover, the current regulatory privacy policy framework will be inadequate for the Web 3.0 due to lack of any centralised entity who can collect and process personal data. Another big challenge of the third- generation web is the scepticism of its being more user-friendly and convenient for the average user.

In Web 3.0 there will be the creation of the intelligent agents who are sufficient enough to use the context and reputation of a source, this helps them to determine the amount of trust that can be put in the source. These agents can adequately communicate among themselves without the interaction and intervention of a human to determine whether the agent of the source can be trusted. This makes an open door for noxious attackers to compose contents which imitate a trustworthy agent and empower them to perform unapproved activities and infuse unsafe contents.

Web 3.0 advancements will depend intensely on semantic tagging. Content authors can control semantic tagging by giving wrong data, and by doing as such enhance their Website positioning. With higher rankings more, clients will visit these Websites dependent on falsified data, which can be tainted with different kinds of malware and harmful contents. This in result may increase the digital colonialism even more. The ideologies of the global north can be imposed more often, and the whole fight for a revolution will turn into a shallow effort in which the biggest losers will be the global south. The reason for the same can be the non – sensitisation and illiteracy towards this technology.

CONCLUSION

There can be no doubt that with the advent of Web 3.0 is a much awaited and welcoming change in the technology. It meets the demands of the modern-day world and looks well – equipped to change the way the internet is seen/experienced today. It puts the power of the internet in the hands of the users and lets them control numerous aspects of the internet which was not possible before. It helps in preserving the privacy of the user and giving the big companies a room to operate by providing them with less sensitive data to use. It does not let the data be in the hands of one server to be mined by it. Instead, it decentralises the entire information and creates a trustless network where the sanctity of information could be maintained. Through this, it creates a level playing field for all the players. All of this proves that Web 3.0 has a vital significance in curbing the digital colonialism. However, it has its difficulties which cannot be ignored. As mentioned above, Web 3.0 has the potential to become a regulating nightmare for the authorities. Moreover, despite being a semantically sentient technology, it has a significant risk of being misappropriated for fake information. In such a scenario, a blind implementation of this technology becomes impossible. Hence, it is needed that a regulating mechanism is established which can use this seemingly promising technology for the benefit of society without harming it.

(Originally published and presented at ICDT Conference 2018 (NLUD), main paper at SSRN.)

(Repetition in some of the content is due to common research among topics. These are draft ideas that will be refined soon.)

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