11–20 of 137 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like, I would feel like "I have my own dedicated global address nobody can take from me" is a decentralizing factor... But at the end of the day I still need my ISP to get me to the Internet, so not really.
The difference is, you can take any ISP and continue your business. 1, 2, 3 or even move somewhere else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like, I would feel like "I have my own dedicated global address nobody can take from me" is a decentralizing factor... But at the end of the day I still need my ISP to get me to the Internet, so not really.
The difference is, you can take any ISP and continue your business. 1, 2, 3 or even move somewhere else.
IPv4 was supposed to run out and the Internet come crashing down 5 years ago, yet here we are, and everything seems just fine, while a billion smartphones were added.
This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits.
However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche groups but I don't see it becoming mainstream.
To purposely be provocative to spur discussion, I will make a bold claim: Decentralization is an unstable equilibrium. It's the centralization that becomes the stable status quo.
If tpcip protocol and http protocol are already decentralized, why do we have centralized services that have "too much power" such as Facebook/Google/Youtube? It's because different actors can spend more money on their particular http node than other http nodes. Those unequal economic forces is what makes decentralization tend towards centralization. There is no technical protocol specification that can prevent that.
E.g. if Git protocol is decentralized, why is there so much concentration on Github? It's because John doesn't want to install a git server on his laptop and punch a DMZ hole through his home router and leave his laptop up & running 24 hours a day to serve up his git repo. He'd rather spend the weekend playing with his children. And Jane doesn't want to spend $30 on a Raspberry Pi and install Gitlab on it to serve up her git repo. Multiply John and Jane's by a million other devs with their own various reasons for not serving up their git repos in a decentralized manner and the emergent phenomenon you get is something like Github.
See the trend? Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not wanting to (1) spend money and (2) not wanting to spend extra time -- to fulfill ideals of decentralization.
I wish we would discuss the above factors much more often and there were more articles about it.
When Amazon starts running its own dark fiber, and you can only use that fiber to buy shoes that are only sold on Amazon, then part of the internet will be close to being centralized. But that would still just be a small part of it, and it still won't happen entirely.
There's a very long tail between Amazon and the user. How does Amazon connect to the user? Sure, it starts in their datacenter. But then immediately they need to connect to multiple points of presence, which means multiple bundles of fiber going in different directions. And so you'd say, sure, Amazon has lots of DCs, so they could just run dark fiber between all of them. But they're not _everywhere_, so they need to eventually peer to a more global network.
Eventually you get to the ISP. There's two kinds of ISPs: wired and wireless. While they're increasingly the same company, there is a wealth of technology, expense, competition, and physical infrastructure wrapped up in each. Copper and fiber runs to every home, customer support, billing, management, contracts with public and private entities. There's multiple companies in these industries that are bigger than Amazon.
Say Amazon becomes its own ISP. They can either run fiber to every home (lol) or become their own nationwide wireless ILEC (lol) or they can become an MVNO and rent access to an ISP's gear (possible) or they can just pay internet backbones to peer with them and get access to all ISPs' customers. The first two would basically be like making a brand new Comcast; uh, good luck with that. The third is what Comcast already does: they rent ILEC's networks to provide their own mobile service, capturing more customers. The last is how the internet operates today: the ISP deals with the complexity of getting everyone in the country online, and Amazon just pays to connect to POPs.
In a non-net-neutrality world, any ISP can add a line-item to your bill for you to get access to Amazon. In that case, Amazon becoming an ISP avoids that, capturing more profit in the process. But why in "Bob"'s name go through all that work, when you can just charge people individually to access your website? Aka, Amazon Prime. So in order to completely control your access to shoes, they can either build an ISP, or just..... use existing ISPs. Currently, most ISPs aren't adding line-items to access Amazon, so the latter works fine.
In another bizzaro possibility, Amazon could merge with every ISP in America, creating a hyperconglomerate, so only Americans could access Amazon, and every ISP bill is charged for Prime, and every non-American ISP has to pay to route traffic to Amazon. I think that would just crush Amazon's sales, but it's possible. But still the internet would be decentralized, at least globally.
And one final option that actually already exists in developing nations: Amazon and a handful of other monopolies subsidize ISPs to create a "bare-bones" internet plan, where you literally can only surf to Facebook, Amazon, and Google, but you only pay $10 a month. This would be a consumer-only internet that is totally centralized and monopolized - but it's still not the whole internet.
Then of course there's every other business in the world that is not consumer-oriented, all of whom depend on the internet for their business. They also have an interest in a decentralized internet, because it helps them compete with each other, too. They'd be happy to fund a decentralized internet, if only for themselves.
This is all besides the fact that decentralization is actually an architectural decision made by a central organization - the DoD. They made it decentralized because it just works better, not because they wanted the whole world to hold hands and sing kumbaya. Even in this fantasy world of a centralized internet, with one company managing all the consumer services, b2b services, and internet connections, they'd still keep a decentralized architecture, because they know it's really friggin' robust. The network architecture has nothing to do with who has control.
If your concern is monopolies, an internet protocol does not change this at all. If your concern is being able to host your own services, that's still at the discretion of your ISP.
If you click the link on how to get your own ipv6 space you get two options: Ask your ISP for an address or set up a tunnel to someone else who will give you one.
These are the same options we have today for ipv4. I went on my crappy large ISP’s website. They are not handing out static ipv6.
Why would they? The problem has always been more about corporate power than tech.
I may be somewhat confused, but how would a different IP address/system prevent centralized services? It seems to me that the same market problems, the strong vendor lock-ins explained in the post, will still persist in IPv6. There's no mention of how/why IPv6 solves those problems, just that they do...
It doesn't prevent them, but with IPv6 everyone can take back control. With IPv4, you are unable to get a decent amount of public addresses to run your service (if you are not having tons of money already).
Think e-mail, for example. It never required you to have an internet routable IP addresses to communicate with anyone. There were and are plenty of local networks where people run local SMTP servers that communicate with upstream SMTP servers over local network and only those have public IP addresses to communicate with SMTP servers over public internet.
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted/