Technology Without Industry

Take for instance IP. IP was designed to be decentralized. And "End to End Arguments in System Design" piled on and led to UDP, further disintermediating sysadmins and their kernels. And we all felt that energy when we discovered the Internet, that magic hope of building new systems that served ourselves with voluntary peer to peer interactions.

But all of this was a bit fallacious, in that there is nothing forcing parties to follow a protocol's guidelines, rather than taking things "as they are" and acting in their own self interest. "I"SPs have deployed DPI gear and transparent proxying, GeoIP providers have forced some implicit notion of location onto every IP address, piracy surveillance firms legally harass people running small routers, etc. Ultimately there was nothing built into the protocol that would prevent these things happening and so they did, despite that boundless world we felt when it was fresh.

Think of how difficult these attacks would have been if most packet fields had been protected with encryption and addresses were based on source routing (onion, of course). Obviously that would have necessitated different technique requirements, and perhaps failed in different ways, but you can see what I'm getting at. There are modern overlay networks that do these things, but since their users are a minority of all users, it is easy to block them outright.

FWIW I see the same thing with Bitcoin and its lack of the untraceability property. How long until the financial control industry ("money laundering") invents a parallel source of truth, and progressively gets it enforced at the exchanges?

I am not okay with Tesla cars can only be charged at Tesla electric stations. We have wonderful things in world because of that M x N relationship.

This sorta of thinking clicks with me. Esp the "discourage not prohibit" framing. I think I have similar hopes, except I maybe hinge my thinking less on direct taxation or regulatory schemes ("if you get above threshold X, we take Y%") and instead lean a little but more on tactics of growing the co-operative ecosystem, which i believe will dampen the bad stuff in similar ways. I feel that co-operative companies tend to grow by collaborating instead of expanding/acquiring -- by scaling whole sector horizontally, instead of individual companies vertically -- and more co-operative companies will results in similar outcomes to what you speak of, but which cannot be easily dismantled as the tides sweep left to right, and back again :)

But I feel aligned with what you're saying, and I would cheer such measures even though I work with other tactics!