Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people blame Cloudflare and Amazon for centralizing everything. I actually disagree; the centralization is a symptom of severe, systemic, unfixable flaws in the design of the internet itself. At least we didn't let AOL define internet.
I'd appreciate if you'd elaborate on that. (Edit: I see you elaborated somewhat in another comment posted before I finished this comment) I tend to think centralization is more about people's tendencies than it is internet design. As I see it, centralization on the internet happens as the emergent behavior of all of the elements in the system and the forces that exist. In other words, it's the natural result of incen…
Level 3 Communications / Lumen; AT&T; Verizon Enterprise.
With those three, you've knocked 2.35 million km, or 1.46 million miles, of fiber optic offline. That's over half of the US backbone in those three companies. Comcast "only" has 0.15 million miles for the sake of comparison. The internet would crash and burn immediately to speeds not seen since the dial-up era. There's nothing we can do about that. Cloudflare and AWS centralizing everything is actually, statistically, less risky than backbone attacks. If you succeeded in knocking down all of the big seven at once; you've got about 80-90% of the backbone offline plus all of the online cloud providers with direct connections to them; at which point the internet would cease to function in any practical sense.