> As a first approximation all the big powerful internet companies are really database providers. Facebook is a database of people’s profiles, their friend graphs and their status updates. Paypal is a database of people’s account balances. Amazon is a database of SKUs, payment credentials and purchase histories. Google is a database of web pages and query histories.
This is profoundly, naively, staggeringly wrong. The products that these companies provide to users[2] are not "the databases" - they are "the ability to do useful, meaningful, real-life impactful things". Facebook is not valuable as a service because of its database - it's valuable because I am able to interact with that database in ways that result in other people seeing the thing that I posted. PayPal is not useful to me because of those recorded balances - it is useful because merchants and financial institutions respect those balances are being equivalent to money. And so on - Amazon is useful because things actually show up at my door, Google is useful because it can use those links/queries to serve me the page that I was searching for.
This is, ironically, why many claims of web3's supremacy fall flat. As this[3] long-but-very-worthwhile rant about NFTs in gaming makes clear, simply claiming "ownership" is almost meaningless for anything other than simple financial transactions (which, I callously suspect, is 99% of what web3 is actually intended for anyway). If you want to say that you "own" a video game gun, that's all well-and-good - but to actually use it in a new game, that requires implementation effort from coders and artists, balancing, support, etc. In fact, the pleasant-sounding ideal of "own your digital assets anywhere!" is nonsense - it's meaningless to _own_ something if you can't actually _do_ anything with it. Ironically, it is actually _better_ for the customer to have their data/assets/what-have-you in a single database owned-and-operated by a single company - because then there is a reason for that company to continue to provide support for interactions _with_ that data.
Don't get me wrong - the commodification of customer data by Big Tech enrages and unsettles me, too, and I feel uncomfortable with the fact that we mostly rent internet services rather than owning them. But I've yet to see a convincing argument that Web3's notion of "ownership" actually results in anything tangible, anything other than bragging rights. If there's a way of effecting that ownership such that you can actually _do_ something with it (other than selling it), I'll be interested.
[1] https://continuations.com/post/671863718643105792/web3crypto...
[2] Obviously, those databases are valuable to advertizing, targeting, marketing, etc. companies, but I'm focusing on the customer experience here. You can't build up a valuable database if you cannot attract customers - and, anyway, isn't one of the whole points of web3 that customer data _isn't_ for sale? (A likely story...)