Recent critiques of how a new decentralized Internet are being built – what’s called web3 – miss a major point, according to the co-founders of one of the firms targeted in the criticism. It’s all about the data.

Web2 is the term used for the current state of the Internet, where enormous companies like Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon own and control their user-generated data for advertising or other revenue-generating purposes. That Facebook post or that like on Twitter are owned by the suits, leaving the people who created them at the whim of whatever that corporation’s terms of service allow.

“What makes web2 centralized is the data, the data is owned by somebody like Facebook and they control access to that data,” Joe Lau, co-founder of Alchemy, recently told me. Alchemy is one of the largest service providers – if not the largest – to the non-fungible token marketplace, offering back-end connections to blockchains as well as tools and analytics for artists or developers who are making NFTs.

Alchemy was singled out in a recent appraisal of web3 by Matthew Rosenfeld, who’s known as Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the encrypted message service Signal. Marlinspike questioned why web3, which is supposed to be decentralized, relies on providers like Alchemy and Infura to interact with blockchains without those services attempting to verify or authenticate the information they gather.

While “well intentioned,” Lau said Marlinspike missed the point. “I can’t go and take my data off of Facebook. I can’t access it if they don’t want me to access it,” he said.

Read More: Moxie’s Web3 Critique and a Step in the Right Direction from Livepeer

In web3, data is community owned, decentralized and open to everybody. “Companies like Alchemy – all we do is help people access that data, but we don’t own that data and we can’t censor anyone from accessing that data,” Lau said. If someone doesn’t like Alchemy they can go use another NFT services provider and still access the data that sits on the blockchain.

“The other thing about the Moxie piece is that it’s looking at the space today, but we really should be looking at the space over a 10-year horizon,” Lau said.

“We have to win our users’ trust,” Nikil Viswanathan, Lau’s partner and Alchemy co-founder told me. They don’t lock their customers in to contracts and don’t have proprietary data, so it’s a difficult business to run because customers can leave at any time, he said.

“You can literally switch off Alchemy in under one minute,” he said. “You can point your infrastructure to somewhere else, you can run it yourself or go to another service.”

I would note here that one of Alchemy’s public relations points for the past year or so has been how dominant it is in the NFT space, so switching to another service provider may not be as easy as Viswanathan makes out. As he was explaining how he views Marlinspike’s complaint to me, he said, “let’s say you’re a company that doesn’t use Alchemy, I can’t think of one off the top of my head” and laughed. He’s not far off the mark.

Marlinspike didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The issue remains for web3 that it’s still very early and hard to deny that most people don’t have the technical skill or desire to run a blockchain node of their own. That limits the true decentralization that can occur in a network, yet is understandable from a convenience point of view.

It’s all about the Data

“The only way it could truly be decentralized is a user running their own node and running their own server infrastructure which in the current way of the world is very difficult to do,” Viswanathan said. While there are challenges, the debate about how to fix them will better serve the discourse if the fundamental differences between web2 and web3 are acknowledged.

“[Amazon Web Services] is centralized,” Viswanathan said. “Alchemy is more like an Internet-service provider. If Comcast goes down or Verizon goes down, you’ll just swap to another one. If AWS goes down, your data’s gone. It’s a very different experience.”