This is incorrect but educationally so: there are many new distributed protocols (RSS/Atom, XMPP, various things around blog interactions like FOAF and ping backs, GraphQL, OpenID, etc.) but the ones which successfully saw adoption were adopted by a few large companies who saw advantages from doing so. Being open or distributed not only wasn’t enough to be competitive with the centralized platforms, it often prevented that since you needed to coordinate improvements across a range of competitors while Google or Facebook could just ship an update.
Consumers didn’t value client decentralization, especially when that meant incompatibility, lower performance, and fewer people they know using a service.
Putting things into a blockchain not only doesn’t help with any of the real problems but makes all of them worse: performance and reliability are completely out of your control, everything costs money (good luck getting users when the competition not only has better features, perform, and social graph but also doesn’t charge them to sign up or send messages!), and since you centralized onto a network run by finance companies the only way to get traction on any of that is to have enough money to be taken seriously.
Standard for identity - not sure what you exactly mean by this, but there’s WebAuthn / OpenID Connect / SAML
Standard for payments - W3C web payments
Whether it’s Bitcoin, DeFi, DAOs or NFTs Web3 allows you to participate in owning digital property at the protocol layer. Imagine if you could have profited directly from your early adopter curiosity and passion for the early internet by owning a part of the base layer, instead of waiting till the IPO where VCs and early shareholders take most of the profits before dumping their bags on the public.
That’s Web3
Email interoperates, but messaging doesn't. There's no adopted standard for identity (except centralised Google/Apple), or for payment (except centralised PayPal/Apple, and the bad UX of entering credit cards).
Turning these (and more) into protocols would allow more innovation at a layer above that. This innovation just can't happen right now, as FAANG have to approve of everything you do that works with systems the populuation already use.
web3 doesn't seem good enough yet to help, but it is at least working on it. And it could potentially solve the lack of identity and payment standards.