4 ms·
The promise of a decentralised internet where the distinction between producer and consumer is entirely up to the person at the keyboard.
by Yetanfou 8y ago
The promise of a decentralised internet where the distinction between producer and consumer is entirely up to the person at the keyboard.
- rocky1138 8y agoNAT killed this dream.
- test6554 8y agoHaving to buy static IPs rather than just getting one with your internet subscription.
- rocky1138 8y agoI wish there had been stronger pushback legislatively for these two (and other) attributes of ISPs.
- quickthrower2 8y agoAnd the "A" in ADSL.
- hrdwdmrbl 8y agoThere's still hope in this front
- convolvatron 8y agotechnically it wouldn't take much (or anything really) for people to transition to a v6 overlay network and get this back again. but i'm afraid that the value of an intermediary-free internet isn't really perceptible enough to drive adoption, even if you made it completely painless. I meet an awful lot of people, even in tech, that are surprised and shocked that you can use a computer thats not sitting right in front of you. or that two computers sitting next to each other can exchange data without using some third party service. computing-as-television really won - just like how for the longest time quite a number of people thought that microsoft windows was the canonical definition of what a computer was.
- zanny 8y agoMore relevantly its also largely out of the power of citizens to make the transition. Especially in the US where you often have no choice in ISP, if they don't provide static IPv6 addresses theres nothing you can do.
- convolvatron 8y agoall you need is someone to broker a tunnel for you. i'm assuming both that such a broker would be an easily managed cost and it that would be relatively cheap and easy to be assigned global blocks.
- hrdwdmrbl 8y agoLike he said though, you can have an overlay network on top of what any ISP gives you. Like Tor does with onion services, Ethereum, DHTs, IPFS, etc. You can make peer-to-peer connections regardless of whether or not you're NAT'd. Of course this technology is still not very popular, but it's possible.
- Yetanfou 8y agoTechnically it is doable, what it lacking is the demand. It is this lack of demand which I deem to be the biggest problem, the fact that the average net user does not realise - or does not care - that they essentially have being herded into a panopticon where the guards are selling tickets for the show to the highest bidder. Attempts to explain this nearly always are met with indifference or hostility. The indifference is the biggest problem here given that I suspect the hostility comes from people who are in denial and as such at least are partly aware of their role in the herd.
- piccolbo 8y agoOther decentralized techs had promise but were later re-centralized (FM radio is the first example that comes to mind). It seems to me techies think that the natural tendency to monopolies in the capitalistic economy can be countered by distributed protocols, and I think the evidence is against that. FM radio -> clear channel. TCP/IP -> NAT. SMTP/IMAP -> gmail, outlook, yahoo. http -> web giants. XMPP -> Facebook messenger. The idea that monopolies are obsolete by the time they form is preposterous. Recommended reading: "The curse of bigness" Tim Wu.