delegating authority to an open and permissionless network of participants doesn't magically solve the problems of centralization, it mostly just subverts the progress we've made as a species towards mitigating those problems
- AJAX (Google Maps, Gmail)
- RSS (podcasts, blogs)
- Bittorrent
- jQuery (website interactivity)
- Flash games
- Flash video (early YouTube)
- database driven server-side CMSes (Wordpress, Drupal)
There is nothing about corporate ownership in these technologies in and of themselves.
web1 and web2 were equally "centralized", the only difference was the scope of their centralized actors
web3 is "decentralized" in a way that is effectively meaningless, trust still exists, authorities still exist, the only difference is that those centralized actors are no longer bound by rules or regulations
web1 -> peer-to-peer decentralized networks without built-in consensus or economics; end up de facto centralized because of this
web2 -> corporate owned networks; from iMessage to Tiktok to Reddit, this is most major networks today
web3 -> networks whose decentralization is enforced by cryptography and economics; Ethereum being one such example of a programmable network
If the terms were just marketing that would be one thing. But they actually describe real differences in properties that have significant consequences for those who build and rely on them.