4 ms·

Highly distributed? Facebook, Google, Amazon and to some extent Apple dominate and they are extremely centralized.

• eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  Yes, but the basic Internet from 1990 is still there. E.g. small websites, self-hosted email, IRC servers.
• pas 7y ago
  Fb, G, MS, Twitter, Atlassian, Reddit, and a lot of companies provide the infrastructure that literally billions of people use to better their lives. They are able to organize, communicate, collaborate, share, search, store, work, supervise, have fun, discuss, learn online. Is there a problem with monocultures? Yes, of course, but our lives are now spread out over space and time a lot more. I'm writing this 19 hours after your comment, very likely from a different country. Just a few minutes ago I was looking at Skype (work, a full-remote team), and Messenger (friends, a group chat where accidentally everyone happens to be hundreds of miles from each other) before that.
  • jacobush 7y ago
    So, you agree and list a bunch of benefits to the centralization.
    • pas 7y ago
      What? Okay, let's forget for a moment the companies and the "implmenetation" of these functions. What I'm trying to say is that the "internet" as such is now a fundamental, essential, non-separable part of many of our lives. Companies run on slack/skype/JIRA, email, voip, businesses depend on the internet, webshopping is basically the default for millions, sports groups live on the internet (StarCraft, DotA), content creators live on the internet, citizen politics depends on the internet a lot of times in turbulent regimes (streaming rights violations). It's not just a "communications" thing anymore. And it's distributed our lives in both space and time.