Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards

Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards
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"In this document, "centralization" is the state of affairs where a single entity or a small group of them can observe, capture, control, or extract rent from the operation or use of an Internet function exclusively."

There are other terms the authors could use: oligopoly, oligarchy, inverted totalitarianism, plutocracy, soft despotism, rent-seeking. But they didn't choose these terms, because the authors aren't political science majors, they are nerds. They're looking at the problem not as one of a larger set of economic, political and social factors, but one of a computer science problem to be solved with computer science means. If you've only ever been a carpenter, and your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

But this isn't a computer science problem, and none of the solutions presented in this document will prevent the forces at work from merely "routing around" any technological barriers imposed. You cannot program around a government.

So for instance, I work on a decentralized VR world (https://overte.org/). Our architecture is very similar to that of the web -- we have a 3D analog of a web server, and a 3D analog of a web browser. Authentication is like on the web -- anonymous by default. Storage is wherever you want to fetch stuff from by HTTP.

That's technically different from other systems in the same space. Eg, Second Life is a very centralized system. There's a grid, the various simulators are placed on a map, there's a central asset storage, and everyone must log in.

If Second Life open sourced their backend, then the resulting outcome would be competing centralized platforms, where you either log into SL, or you log into the alternative. Each of those is a self-contained universe that you can be completely be removed from.

And sure, there are various political implications there, but it's also a matter of what technical decisions and tradeoffs you make. SL for instance assumes everyone has an user account. Our system assumes everyone is anonymous by default. In SL there can be a coherent notion of a "world map" because a central entity decides which simulator goes where. In our system, such a thing is not possible because any given world has an arbitrary size and arbitrary owner, there's no way to say Alice and Bob are neighbors, nor there is a central system to ask for a definitive answer.

The system is so well designed for this that IMO it likely was one of the things that made the business model of the original maker of it (High Fidelity) fail. The design is just naturally resistant to monetization. To the point that when I first encountered it, I was baffled at how it was ever going to make any money. The very design looks like something a highly ideological and anti-corporate group would come up with to make sure that even if some of them fell to the "dark side", there still wouldn't be a way to make a profit.

But, the section of this on federation is remarkably level-headed and pragmatic. It's not a panacea and it creates a lot of friction and new problems that otherwise wouldn't exist.

And this is before you get into the benefits for the end-user, which are typically none.

The profit motive will always build a wall--technically, operationally--or an "enclosure", if you will, legislatively or politically. The only ones committed to "openness" or "open source" or "open access" are those who have already lost in the marketplace, which is why people say things like "open source is for losers" [1].

If we look at what works it's collective ownership eg Wikipedia. As another commenter shrewdly noted, this is a political not a technical problem. It's about the workers relationship to the means of production. It's who gets to capture ("exploit") the value created. And that's not a political statement. It's just materialist analysis.

But people don't want to hear that because they see themselves as future bag-holders and collective ownership threatens their ability to one day be at the top of the ladder, even though (most likely) they'll never be at the top of the ladder.

[1]: https://siliconangle.com/2014/05/29/only-loser-vendors-are-t...

> something a highly ideological and anti-corporate group would come up with to make sure that even if some of them fell to the "dark side", there still wouldn't be a way to make a profit.

No. The motive is to make sure that even if some of them fell to the "dark side", there wouldn't be a way to destroy the efforts of those who choose not to make a profit.