Grant for the Web

One of our most aspiring goals at GateHub is to make any form of value available to anyone, in real time. We get very excited to see any initiative that works towards making the world a better place and get especially excited to see new solutions for value on the internet.

What has us excited right now is the Grant for the Web which is a collaborative effort between Mozilla, Creative Commons and our friends at Coil.

The Web

On October 29, 1969, the first message between two computers was transmitted. One was located at UCLA and the other at Stanford University. The short message “LOGIN” failed to transmit completely. This proto network was called ARPAnet.

In the 70s, the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol were developed to set the standard of communication between multiple networks. The modern Internet began to take shape out of this network of networks.

In 1990, the World Wide Web was introduced by one Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The first website was published on December 20, 1990 describing the project itself. The most common way of accessing data online is still by using websites and hyperlinks.

Early browsers like Mosaic and Netscape were key to making the technology accessible to the masses by using graphic user interfaces to browse the web.

At first, only web page titles could be searched but in a matter of only a few years, search engines would become popular. Yahoo! and Altavista were among the first search engines and both became available in 1995. Google was incorporated a few years later in 1998.

The Grant

So why are we excited? Grant for the Web announced a $100M fund whose mission is:

“[...] to protect the open web and advance internet health, […] to maintain open licensing infrastructure and […] to use open standards to create alternative business models for the web that respect our privacy and support creators and publishers.” - Source

The issues identified by the founders mostly stem from the platform-based infrastructure of the modern web. The advent of web 2.0 allowed platforms to take advantage of invasive advertising, data trafficking, AI-generated recommendations, site-by-site subscriptions and user generated content for profit.

The $100 million fund will support Web Monetization and payment ecosystems in challenging the web's most urgent issues as identified by the collaborators Mozilla, Creative Commons and Coil:

“[...] loss of privacy, centralization of power, and inequalities in online participation.” - Source

The First Call for Proposals

The Grant for the Web’s first public call for proposals was published on April 30, 2020. This initial call will support projects that contribute to an ecosystem of web monetized content, users, tools, and infrastructure. The application window closes on June 12, 2020.

Want to participate or simply learn more? Check out the call for Proposals and the Grant’s FAQ.