By Pritish Beesooa – Head of Blockchain and Web3 Development
You Own Nothing – and That’s by Design
For decades, the internet has taught us a dangerous lie: that access equals ownership.
We stream music, but we don’t own it.
We post content, but platforms profit from it.
We build followings, but we don’t own the audience.
In the world of Web2 ruled by platforms like Facebook (Meta), YouTube, Apple, and Amazon – users live inside rented ecosystems. We generate value, but the platforms harvest and monetise it. Our digital lives are governed by terms of service we didn’t write and algorithms we can’t interrogate.
Web3 promised to change that. With NFTs, blockchain, and decentralised metaverses, it claimed to hand the keys back to the user. “Now you can own your digital assets,” they said.
But look closer. Peel back the slogans. The reality is more complicated and more familiar than you might think.
What Does It Mean to “Own” Something Online?
Ownership is more than a purchase. In law, it’s the right to use, exclude, modify, sell, or pass on. It comes with enforceability and autonomy.
In Web2, you don’t own your photos on Instagram. You license them.
You don’t own your Twitter/X followers. The platform controls the pipe.
Even the apps you “buy” from Apple – you don’t really own them. You’re granted revocable access.
Web3 positioned itself as the antidote to this but in many cases, it replicates the same architecture.
Most NFTs are just metadata pointing to a file hosted off-chain, often stored on servers that look suspiciously like Web2 — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or occasionally, decentralised systems like IPFS (which still rely on community uptime to function) and Arweave. No court will defend your NFT if it disappears. No one is obliged to maintain the file it links to.
You own the token — not the thing.
And in many cases, that token doesn’t confer copyright, commercial rights, or even consistent platform access. It’s a symbol of ownership not ownership itself.
Metaverse Property: The New Tenant Economy
The illusion is even stronger in the so-called metaverse.
When you “buy land” in Decentraland or Sandbox, you are not acquiring a deed in the legal sense. You’re purchasing a license to interact with space on a platform controlled by a foundation, funded by venture capital, and operated by developers who can change the rules at any time.
This isn’t digital real estate. It’s digital tenancy.
You’re a tenant in a closed ecosystem, subject to platform governance – just like in Web2.
If Facebook can delete your profile, Decentraland can reconfigure your land. If Apple can remove your app, OpenSea can delist your NFT. If Google can erase your YouTube channel, a blockchain-based game can rug-pull your assets by rewriting the smart contract or going offline.
The governance model hasn’t changed. Only the branding has.
Web2’s Ghosts Are Living in Web3’s Machines
In many ways, Web3 is haunted by Web2’s design philosophy:
Closed architectures masked as “communities”
Corporate gatekeeping disguised as “governance”
User data still captured, only now tokenised
Scarcity artificially created to induce FOMO and speculation
Platforms profiting off unpaid user labour — again
The difference is that Web2 never claimed to be decentralised. Web3 does and that makes its failures feel more like betrayals than flaws.
As anthropologist David Graeber argued in The Utopia of Rules, bureaucracy doesn’t disappear — it just becomes harder to see. In Web3, the platform logic of control, exclusion, and monetisation hasn’t vanished. It’s simply been obfuscated behind smart contracts, Discord servers, and DAOs run by whales.
Behavioural Manipulation in the Age of Digital Scarcity
Web2 exploited your attention. Web3 exploits your belief.
By minting artificially scarce assets – JPEGs, skins, land parcels – Web3 inherits the economic dynamics of speculative capitalism while marketing it as empowerment. But scarcity in digital environments is not natural. It is coded, enforced, and curated.
And behavioural economics tells us this works. The endowment effect means once we “own” something (or think we do), we assign it more value. The scarcity heuristic means we’re more likely to chase what’s perceived to be rare – even if the rarity is fabricated.
This is not financial liberation. It’s UX-driven gamification of ownership.
What Does True Digital Ownership Require?
If we want to escape the failures of Web2 and fulfil the promises of Web3, we must move beyond tokenised illusions. Real digital ownership needs:
- Legal clarity, not vibes
- Data portability, not platform lock-in
- Decentralised storage, not single points of failure
- Cross-platform interoperability, not siloed loyalty
- Actual governance participation, not whale-dominated DAOs
- Self-sovereign identity, not centralised login tokens
- Smart contracts that are auditable and enforceable, not opaque and mutable by insiders
Until then, we’re not owners. We’re just better-dressed users in a shinier, more expensive walled garden.
Conclusion: If You Can’t Leave with It, You Don’t Own It
Ownership is not about holding a token. It’s about holding power.
It’s the ability to move your data, content, assets, and value across ecosystems with or without permission. It’s not what you can buy, but what you can take with you.
Web2 never let you leave.
Web3 says you can – but too often, it’s still lying.
So the next time someone tells you they “own” a piece of the internet, ask:
Can you still access it if the platform shuts down?
Can you defend it if it’s taken from you?
Can you move it — and its value — anywhere else?
If the answer is no, then what they have is not ownership. It’s conditional access to a controlled environment.
That’s not the future of the internet.
That’s just a sequel to the one we already wanted to escape.
