Decentralisation efforts at this point is very akin to the democratic movements from centuries ago. Governments being reluctant to entertain efforts of taking back control, most recent example being StarLink asked to stop selling in India since they aren't registered as an ISP. The whole point of satellite internet is to avoid geo-control by any government body or local ISP.
Avoiding Internet Centralization
61–70 of 111 posts
Re: Avoiding Internet Centralization
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see your point, but do all those network level improvements mean much to the end user when so many critical services live in datacenters owned by 1 company? Many of which in a single region on the east coast, that goes dark at least a couple times a year for hours on end?
Some perspective: in 1986 the Internet experienced a congestive collapse that reduced the useful throughput by 3 orders of magnitude. End users noticed, and if it happened today there would be pandemonium. The Internet has become so robust and reliable that end users take the network for granted. At this point most of the headline-making incidents involve services running on the Internet, not the Internet itself (at…
I love the internet as it is today (facebook and google aside) the system is reliable enough for us. But the discussion is about centralization. This is not about infrastructure.
The day facebook was down for a few hours, I was asked why the internet was down. That person uses the internet for fb and whatsapp (also fb) A decentralized communication protocol and a federated social network wouldn't fail completely under the same circumstances.
Re: Avoiding Internet Centralization
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some perspective: in 1986 the Internet experienced a congestive collapse that reduced the useful throughput by 3 orders of magnitude. End users noticed, and if it happened today there would be pandemonium. The Internet has become so robust and reliable that end users take the network for granted. At this point most of the headline-making incidents involve services running on the Internet, not the Internet itself (at…
I love the internet as it is today (facebook and google aside) the system is reliable enough for us. But the discussion is about centralization. This is not about infrastructure. The day facebook was down for a few hours, I was asked why the internet was down. That person uses the internet for fb and whatsapp (also fb) A decentralized communication protocol and a federated social network wouldn't fail completely unde…
I think that's more a statement about how reliable the current system is where users think their network is down rather than facebook which would be unthinkable.
Re: Avoiding Internet Centralization
#64Decentralisation efforts at this point is very akin to the democratic movements from centuries ago. Governments being reluctant to entertain efforts of taking back control, most recent example being StarLink asked to stop selling in India since they aren't registered as an ISP. The whole point of satellite internet is to avoid geo-control by any government body or local ISP.
The whole point of satellite Internet is to fill in connectivity gaps where you can’t otherwise run high-speed fiber or wireless towers.
It does not avoid government control. Even ignoring local legalities, at the very least it will be under the physical control of whichever country hosts the nearest ground-segment station.
Re: Avoiding Internet Centralization
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are the definition of centralized.
Two networks are less centralized than one. Why do people think centralization is binary?
And Starlink is especially good, because it can compete with all of the cable companies at once. No one will have a monopoly anymore. Hopefully a lot of people will suddenly start getting better service, which I hear is common when competition rolls into town.
Re: Avoiding Internet Centralization
#66> Some protocols require the introduction of centralization risk that is unavoidable by nature. For example, when there is a need a single, globally coordinated 'source of truth', that facility is by nature centralized. No, there is nothing unavoidable in making a centralized DNS system.
What? Practical addressability requires centralization by definition. How could it work otherwise?
If we go for human-readable and decentralized with reasonable security, we can look towards 'petname' systems, like the 'Address Book' software popular on the I2P network. Petnames are the subjective binding of public keys to shortened names, where a user resolves domain names to keys according to a combination of their own personal list (which can be easily expanded with specially-formatted 'address helper links') and the lists of third parties which they have chosen to trust (or which they have been bootstrapped into, thus trusting the bootstrapper by proxy). No need for environmentally unfriendly proof of work schemes or what-have-you. This falls on the 'less secure' point of Zooko's Triangle in the sense that, although it is very practical, decentralized, and usually avoids conflict, it does have trust-based security flaws if those providing their lists ('resolvers' if you will) manage to swap out keys for a petname without anyone noticing.
Re: Avoiding Internet Centralization
#67I think centralization is just a property of reality. Everything is centralized. Crypto is centralized in certain ways (mining capacity, holdings), capital is centralized to the top 0.1% in every country and so on. It is better to design systems to handle centralization than with the assumption that they will remain decentralized, which would sort of break them.
I disagree. As just one counterexample, consider the mycorrhizal fungal networks that mediate access to nutrients among trees--they've been doing their job without centralized intervention for billions of years.
If it seems like everything that we build is centralized, it might just be that we're bad at building things that last.
Re: Avoiding Internet Centralization
#68They should probably add that merely adding yet another protocol centralizes things.
Implementing them takes time and you need many implementations for the protocols themselves to become de-centralized.
This is what breaks most new protocols and languages combined with diminishing returns (low hanging fruit has allready been harvested).
Personally I'm going back to HTTP, DNS and SMTP.
And even if DNS is completely centralized, it's the only thing we have for name lookups after 38 years!
Also I never rely on DNS if I can avoid it (I use static IPs and only use the hostname for virtual hosting / load balancing).
And de-centralization by hosting is more important than the protocol itself being p2p, since no p2p protocol can operate purely without server because of discovery.
I have made my own, from scratch, implementation of all 3:
DNS and SMTP soon coming to a rupy (HTTP), enabling DNS and SMTP through HTTP, you'll basically be able to control DNS and SMTP via a "Servlet/Filter".
Home hosting on fiber with static IP and ports 80, 53 and 25 open is the real challenge.
Making sure your ISP enables those has way higher priority than this document!
And the real canary is when you don't get an external IP on your fiber when IPv4 allocations in Africa run out.
It's time to wake up if we want an internet that does not become rent seeking.
Google charges for static IP addresses on GCP which should not be a thing if they get allocations for free.
IPv4 is a scarce asset, so they have an incentive to slow down IPv6!
Re: Avoiding Internet Centralization
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it? In the UK BT owns all the wires and stuff yet i don't think it majorly affects consumers, nor are their competitiors being crushed.
See if you can find our ENUM registry and use it. BT doesn't own our wires as such. OpenReach does (yes they were formally BT but spinned off). BT or OpenReach - who cares? The important thing is functionality. I'd like to provide you with a novel telephony setup but the lack of ENUM means I am not able to do that.
>BT doesn't own our wires as such. OpenReach does (yes they were formally BT but spinned off).
Openreach are a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT, they're not really independent.
Re: Avoiding Internet Centralization
#70They should probably add that merely adding yet another protocol centralizes things. Implementing them takes time and you need many implementations for the protocols themselves to become de-centralized. This is what breaks most new protocols and languages combined with diminishing returns (low hanging fruit has allready been harvested). Personally I'm going back to HTTP, DNS and SMTP. And even if DNS is completely ce…
> And even if DNS is completely centralized, it's the only thing we have for name lookups after 38 years!
Depending on how you mean, it's not the only thing or its not 100% centralized; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root lists the major alternatives in that immediate space.