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It seems to me that one significant barrier is that most people don't have a static IP. If we can move to IPv6, will ISPs start issuing static IPs for everyone by default?
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That also explains to libertarians why people like "The State". They don't necessarily feel they need to decentralize everything. But the real reason is, it just hasn't become convenient yet. One day, each community will run its own open-source software that will manage local taxes and services without having to wait for Big Government to do it.
The trend in private (as in commercial, non profit etc) internet is exactly opposite. Why do you expect the public (as in state) to be different?
Does anyone remember the "decentralized web" of the early 2000s? Varous P2P protocols existed that allowed everyone to share content freely, and they did. Content that was not even originally in digital form was digitised and nothing but a search away. It was amazing. The copyright/media industry didn't like that. Security paranoia (possibly assisted by the industry) also heightened its demise. I really do hope we se…
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ISPs don't do that. That's your NAT/firewall. Has anyone ever actually seen an ISP network that filters local traffic to other ISP endpoints? I'm not even sure why they would do that. DDOS almost always targets big things in the cloud so it would not help there. Here (SoCal) traceroute to a host in the same local neighborhood is three hops.
A lot of ISPs have (probably unenforcable) clauses in their ToS saying your can't run services.
In any case the encrypted p2p protocols run by dapps (decentralized apps) are opaque, and these don't really qualify as servers because architecturally they are not client-server at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ISPs don't do that. That's your NAT/firewall. Has anyone ever actually seen an ISP network that filters local traffic to other ISP endpoints? I'm not even sure why they would do that. DDOS almost always targets big things in the cloud so it would not help there. Here (SoCal) traceroute to a host in the same local neighborhood is three hops.
It's pretty common to have outbound traffic to port 25 blocked as an anti-spambot measure. Sometimes you can call them and get them to remove the block, other times it's non-negotiable.
Lesson: any distributed or federated protocol that is not robust against abuse is doomed.
The example of GitHub they use is actually telling. Git is decentralized, so why use GitHub? The answer may be surprising: It's because social has not been decentralized. Yes, status.net existed for a while but it was just about publishing short updates. Also, a few years ago several guys from my college raised money to make Diaspora. That didn't fulfill the promise of a decentralized social web either. Bitcoin is de…
Don't forget that for email to get popular, it had to be mostly centralized (Hotmail, Gmail, etc), we are lucky it's still at least federated. Bitcoin, same story -- mass adoption turns out to be dependent on service providers hosting the wallet, and most users are not miners, eroding many of the decentralization benefits.
For example a dentist can include a Maps widget and the user can get directions while the maps widget knows the user's address and the dentist knows his medical history and both can display it to him on the same page instantly without either one knowing the other's info. It does this using iframes.
I also mean enabling decentralized networking topologies, eg collaborating on a document without the signal having to go to Google Docs, or planning get-togethers and coordinating efforts in your African village via running various social apps on the the local network.
That's the type of decentralization that is actually useful.
Does anyone remember the "decentralized web" of the early 2000s? Varous P2P protocols existed that allowed everyone to share content freely, and they did. Content that was not even originally in digital form was digitised and nothing but a search away. It was amazing. The copyright/media industry didn't like that. Security paranoia (possibly assisted by the industry) also heightened its demise. I really do hope we se…
I do have to question the notion that free entertainment is what empowers people, but I suppose it isn't the stupidest attempt at justifying piracy I've ever read.
The real issue is that we need to make it illegal to give out free content, unless it's distributed under an open license. Otherwise advertising-supported businesses will always be able to outcompete everyone else via dumping, and these businesses always benefit from being increasingly centralized. That's why we don't have liberal newspapers anymore in the U.S., because ad supported papers put them all out of busines…
The centralization is a good point, but I wanted to ask about why > we don't have liberal newspapers anymore in the U.S. Most conservatives would say the papers and media outlets are _all_ liberal. Would you expand on that spectrum? > it's unethical to surf the web without using an adblocker It's also unethical to insert malware into ads, or to hire syndication services that allow it. I'll continue to block until tha…
How many active communist newspapers are there left in the U.S.? As far as I know zero, but I could be mistaken.
And yet those are what gave us our labor laws, integrated workplaces, women's rights, etc.