> So I think the argument was that it made economic sense for a single organization to own all the wires, so it could maintain them with a set of common specifi

> So I think the argument was that it made economic sense for a single organization to own all the wires, so it could maintain them with a set of common specifications and processes. Well, sort of. At least insofar as The Idea Factory describes it, AT&T was able to maintain its monopoly for a large number of reasons: first-mover advantage, vertical integration (through Western Electric), wartime value, political connections, public perception, and so on. It is true, though, that once people realized a monopoly was not necessarily the best state of the industry, the winds started shifting. > So my question is: Is it possible there will be a breakthrough in decentralized distributed computing? One could make the argument that the idea of the blockchain and the rise of Bitcoin and Ethereum embody this (: > Centralized distributed computing will always be more efficient than decentralized distributed computing (?) I'm not aware of any fundamental theorems here but it seems within the realm of possibility. The speed of light comes to mind, which places a hard minimum on the speed of network communications.