Stakeholders have bemoaned the internet’s monopolization for years, with large players like Amazon, Google and Facebook (now Meta) cornering large swathes of it for themselves.

As we approach the maturation of Web3, the industry would be wise to learn from the mistakes of earlier eras, according to Ryan Gill (pictured), founder of the Open Meta Association.

“We had the first act, which was really, truly open,” he said. “There was this idea that the internet is for the end user. And then Web2 came, and we got a lot of really great business models from it, and it got closed up. And now, as we enter this third act, we have the opportunity to learn from both of those, and so I think Web3 needs to go back to the values of Web1, with the lessons in hindsight of Web2.”

Gill spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier at Monaco Crypto Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the pitfalls the industry must avoid as Web3 gradually takes hold. (* Disclosure below.)

Building an open, democratized metaverse

Most of the world’s companies, businesses and institutions have already caught on to the Web3 craze and are onboarding themselves — in some way or other — into blockchain, crypto and the metaverse.

Open Meta, for its part, is laying the groundwork upon which the future metaverse will exist, according to Gill.

“The entity structure of what I do is a company called Crucible [Networks] out of the U.K., but I found out very quickly that just a purely for-profit closed company, a commercial company won’t achieve this objective,” Gill explained.

Because of these limitations, Gill decided to create Open Meta as a decentralized autonomous organization our of Switzerland. 

“We’ve developed a protocol, because we believe that the internet built by game developers is how you define the metaverse,” he said.

Open Meta is developing open technologies that can be harnessed as public goods through its emergence protocol, which defines the interoperability between the game engines and wallets.

“So, you have Unity and Unreal, which all the game developers are sort of building with, and we have built software that drops into those game engines to map ownership between the wallet and the experience in the game,” Gill concluded.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Monaco Crypto Summit event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Monaco Crypto Summit event. Neither DigitalBits, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE