iTunes essentially acts as a public database for podcast feed links. You can use their–admittedly inflexible–API to populate a list of podcasts in an app or web

iTunes essentially acts as a public database for podcast feed links. You can use their–admittedly inflexible–API to populate a list of podcasts in an app or website you create. Or you can use a number of other public feed lists. If iTunes suddenly stopped supporting podcasts (which they won't), then another popular public database will materialize. The real debate here is what does centralization mean in the realm of content distribution? I mean people will always gravitate toward popular platforms that offer nice features like commenting, profiles, rating, etc. but that information is all secondary to the podcast protocol. If a single server hosting a single podcast's files goes down, the whole system does not stop working. Is that not decentralization?