15 ms·

The importance of decentralisation

300 points by telmich 7y ago

nicey 7y ago
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted/ https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted/
- telmich 7y ago
  Very nice one - thanks for the pointer, I'll even add it to the blog!
  - telmich 7y ago
    ... and updated.
- dooglius 7y ago
  Does anyone else find it ironic that this is hosted on GitHub?
  - sooheon 7y ago
    Even the mode of presentation ("awesome-$FOO") is a very uniform meme.
- nebulon 7y ago
  If you want to selfhost many of those apps, we have built a tool (Cloudron) to take away most of the deployment hassle for many of those apps mentioned in the link. Also to work around the provider lock-in with ipv4 addresses while hosting from your home or on-premise we have a built-in dynamic DNS feature https://cloudron.io/documentation/networking/#dynamic-dns https://cloudron.io/documentation/networking/#dynamic-dns So in the end it doesn't matter if you change ISP or if you don't even have a static ipv4 as such.
  - olah_1 7y ago
    Cloudron is missing apps for most use cases I actually care about. Can you add a google photos type app? Maybe Piwigo (it has a good mobile app) or OwnPhotos[1] (it has face/object recognition). Lychee doesn't have a mobile app or face/object recognition. Can you add some communication apps like Matrix Synapse or Ejabberd? Mattermost is walled off from the outside world. Can you add some social apps like Pleroma or Mastodon? [1]: https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos
    - nebulon 7y ago
      I wasn't very much aware of ownphotos looks great and will add it to our backlog. Thanks! Otherwise, Matrix+Riot is being worked on already. Mastodon is similarly mostly done https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/1136/mastodon-microblogging https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/1136/mastodon-microblogging Our latest addition is now OnlyOffice, currently in testing mode.
    - shuriky 7y ago
      Well, Cloudron provides apps for most use cases most people need. So the fact that you need some obscure apps doesn't invalidate Cloudron as a great solution. I've been using it for a long time and love what it has to offer. Plus the devs are great and keep working on making it better.
  - anderspitman 7y ago
    I think something like Sandstorm/Cloudron is the way forward with decentralization. I'm more than happy to pay someone else to manage all my services for me. But I see where my apps are hosted as the least interesting question. The important issue for me is lock-in. How easy would it be to switch if Cloudron does something I don't like, or if they outright ban me for some reason? If it's easy to switch, that keeps incentives aligned and fosters competition and progress. Does Cloudron do anything to mitigate lock-in?
    - nebulon 7y ago
      Since the whole stack runs on your server there is no real way to ban anyone as such. Worst case is that you would loose access to updates, however all our app packages are MIT licensed (eg. https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/nextcloud-app https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/nextcloud-app ) as such you could just build the app image with docker locally and push to your server manually.
- shuriky 7y ago
  +1 for Cloudron
Temasik 7y ago
https://bitcoinsv.com/en/learn/independence-day https://bitcoinsv.com/en/learn/independence-day < this is the tool
oakejp12 7y ago
I may be somewhat confused, but how would a different IP address/system prevent centralized services? It seems to me that the same market problems, the strong vendor lock-ins explained in the post, will still persist in IPv6. There's no mention of how/why IPv6 solves those problems, just that they do...
- telmich 7y ago
  It doesn't prevent them, but with IPv6 everyone can take back control. With IPv4, you are unable to get a decent amount of public addresses to run your service (if you are not having tons of money already).
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    You are talking about lower layer protocols here that don't matter for decentralization. In fact, a decentralized transport protocol can be made that doesn't require your ISP to give you an internet routable IP address nor put you behind NAT. Think e-mail, for example. It never required you to have an internet routable IP addresses to communicate with anyone. There were and are plenty of local networks where people run local SMTP servers that communicate with upstream SMTP servers over local network and only those have public IP addresses to communicate with SMTP servers over public internet.
  - peterwwillis 7y ago
    > with IPv6 everyone can take back control Any service provider can just decide not to route consumer-facing IPv6 addresses. It's not like we all had tons of our own free routable static IPv4 addresses two decades ago, you still had to get them allocated from a service provider and have them route to you, and be allowed to host services. They're "giving away" IPv6 routing and allocation right now, but there is absolutely nothing stopping them from ending that practice. You only have the control they allow you to have.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  Like, I would feel like "I have my own dedicated global address nobody can take from me" is a decentralizing factor... But at the end of the day I still need my ISP to get me to the Internet, so not really.
hkjhreiou 7y ago
So what's the latest deal with IPv6? IPv4 was supposed to run out and the Internet come crashing down 5 years ago, yet here we are, and everything seems just fine, while a billion smartphones were added.
- tambre 7y ago
  > while a billion smartphones were added A huge number of them being on IPv6-only mobile networks using NAT64 to access the old Internet.
- telmich 7y ago
  That was a really bad miscommunication - especially as we are running out of IPv4 in Europe this month. - see https://ungleich.ch/u/blog/when-does-ripe-run-out-of-ipv4-addresses/ https://ungleich.ch/u/blog/when-does-ripe-run-out-of-ipv4-ad...
explodingcamera 7y ago
Missed a really cool vanity url opportunity :)
jasode 7y ago
It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits. However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche groups but I don't see it becoming mainstream. To purposely be provocative to spur discussion, I will make a bold claim: Decentralization is an unstable equilibrium. It's the centralization that becomes the stable status quo. If tpcip protocol and http protocol are already decentralized, why do we have centralized services that have "too much power" such as Facebook/Google/Youtube? It's because different actors can spend more money on their particular http node than other http nodes. Those unequal economic forces is what makes decentralization tend towards centralization. There is no technical protocol specification that can prevent that. E.g. if Git protocol is decentralized, why is there so much concentration on Github? It's because John doesn't want to install a git server on his laptop and punch a DMZ hole through his home router and leave his laptop up & running 24 hours a day to serve up his git repo. He'd rather spend the weekend playing with his children. And Jane doesn't want to spend $30 on a Raspberry Pi and install Gitlab on it to serve up her git repo. Multiply John and Jane's by a million other devs with their own various reasons for not serving up their git repos in a decentralized manner and the emergent phenomenon you get is something like Github. See the trend? Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not wanting to (1) spend money and (2) not wanting to spend extra time -- to fulfill ideals of decentralization. I wish we would discuss the above factors much more often and there were more articles about it.
- telmich 7y ago
  Love the challenge. Let me start by replying to your DMZ comment: with IPv6, you actually have to rethink and with it you can organise the Internet very different from today. I agree with you that people don't want to maintain complex systems. But then again, running a git server or even cgit, is a matter of little minutes spent, especially if you use ready to deploy toolchains. I also think you have a point in terms of equilibrium - people are in general more comfortable with something they know. And due to the long history of IPv4 shortage, people are used to having private IPv4 space only. It is like animals in a zoo - we don't know anymore, how good the life used to be with public IPv4 addresses, we have grown up without them. What I have seen from many discussions and visits in the last months is that IT startups are now reconsidering and embracing IPv6, because it gives freedom. I'd also say the approach is not to directly replace facebook & co., but to think completely different. Why do I need a website to write to you? I can write directly to you, if both of us are on an IPv6 network. Thinking different is the key for decentralisation.
peterwwillis 7y ago
The internet will not stop being decentralized just because there are some consumer product monopolies. When Amazon starts running its own dark fiber, and you can only use that fiber to buy shoes that are only sold on Amazon, then part of the internet will be close to being centralized. But that would still just be a small part of it, and it still won't happen entirely. There's a very long tail between Amazon and the user. How does Amazon connect to the user? Sure, it starts in their datacenter. But then immediately they need to connect to multiple points of presence, which means multiple bundles of fiber going in different directions. And so you'd say, sure, Amazon has lots of DCs, so they could just run dark fiber between all of them. But they're not _everywhere_, so they need to eventually peer to a more global network. Eventually you get to the ISP. There's two kinds of ISPs: wired and wireless. While they're increasingly the same company, there is a wealth of technology, expense, competition, and physical infrastructure wrapped up in each. Copper and fiber runs to every home, customer support, billing, management, contracts with public and private entities. There's multiple companies in these industries that are bigger than Amazon. Say Amazon becomes its own ISP. They can either run fiber to every home (lol) or become their own nationwide wireless ILEC (lol) or they can become an MVNO and rent access to an ISP's gear (possible) or they can just pay internet backbones to peer with them and get access to all ISPs' customers. The first two would basically be like making a brand new Comcast; uh, good luck with that. The third is what Comcast already does: they rent ILEC's networks to provide their own mobile service, capturing more customers. The last is how the internet operates today: the ISP deals with the complexity of getting everyone in the country online, and Amazon just pays to connect to POPs. In a non-net-neutrality world, any ISP can add a line-item to your bill for you to get access to Amazon. In that case, Amazon becoming an ISP avoids that, capturing more profit in the process. But why in "Bob"'s name go through all that work, when you can just charge people individually to access your website? Aka, Amazon Prime. So in order to completely control your access to shoes, they can either build an ISP, or just..... use existing ISPs. Currently, most ISPs aren't adding line-items to access Amazon, so the latter works fine. In another bizzaro possibility, Amazon could merge with every ISP in America, creating a hyperconglomerate, so only Americans could access Amazon, and every ISP bill is charged for Prime, and every non-American ISP has to pay to route traffic to Amazon. I think that would just crush Amazon's sales, but it's possible. But still the internet would be decentralized, at least globally. And one final option that actually already exists in developing nations: Amazon and a handful of other monopolies subsidize ISPs to create a "bare-bones" internet plan, where you literally can only surf to Facebook, Amazon, and Google, but you only pay $10 a month. This would be a consumer-only internet that is totally centralized and monopolized - but it's still not the whole internet. Then of course there's every other business in the world that is not consumer-oriented, all of whom depend on the internet for their business. They also have an interest in a decentralized internet, because it helps them compete with each other, too. They'd be happy to fund a decentralized internet, if only for themselves. This is all besides the fact that decentralization is actually an architectural decision made by a central organization - the DoD. They made it decentralized because it just works better, not because they wanted the whole world to hold hands and sing kumbaya. Even in this fantasy world of a centralized internet, with one company managing all the consumer services, b2b services, and internet connections, they'd still keep a decentralized architecture, because they know it's really friggin' robust. The network architecture has nothing to do with who has control. If your concern is monopolies, an internet protocol does not change this at all. If your concern is being able to host your own services, that's still at the discretion of your ISP.
mapgrep 7y ago
The article calls ipv6 an “easy way” to decentralize but I don’t see it. If you click the link on how to get your own ipv6 space you get two options: Ask your ISP for an address or set up a tunnel to someone else who will give you one. These are the same options we have today for ipv4. I went on my crappy large ISP’s website. They are not handing out static ipv6. Why would they? The problem has always been more about corporate power than tech.
- thu2111 7y ago
  That'll change with time. I'm behind ISP NAT for IPv4 but have static IPv6 direct to all my devices in the home. My ISP ran out of IPv4 relatively early so had to go this way. On the other hand, this won't really change much for the firewall issues named above. Computers are too insecure to expose them all to the internet, all the time. We'd need pretty radical changes in how software is written to create a truly flat worldwide network (which has never existed before).
hirundo 7y ago
This underlines the positive side of Tall Poppy Syndrome. Envy has a number of serious down sides, including making the sufferer miserable for, usually, very little return. But when people stop using an Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc., because they are successful, it creates a counter-force to centralization. Like hate, when well directed, envy can be good. Like hate, it can easily get out of control and cause great damage, up to and including genocides.
- dgb23 7y ago
  Envy might be a factor but I feel like wanting freedom and mistrusting authorities/corporations are stronger here.
foobar_ 7y ago
Some random thoughts on centralization vs decentralization. In theory, IPv6 allows every human, pet, alien and robot to have an address. Each address can host let's say the following services 1. info - dns 2. data transfer - ftp/http/p2p/... 3. communication - email/voip/... 4. entertainment - game server/media server/... Right now the biggest problems with decentralisation are 1. ownership of hardware 2. assigning of address and interfacing with the network. 3. configuration and setup of services 4. scalability of the service 5. using decentralized stuff for illegal activities I think 2 and 3 is the biggest win improving decentralized services and getting rid of facebook and the like. Why are two and 3 still hard? This will also make decentralized services appealing to normal folks. The biggest challenge to making decentralized services mainstream is 5. Hardware is manufactured by a few monopolies and they impose some restrictions and tracking abilities. The assigning of an address is done by the telecom and they have some rules, regulations and tracking abilities. Each country right now is setting up new rules and regulations for the data that comes into it. As configuring and the setting up of stuff is hard we once again have a few major services. The illegal activity makes decentralized services seem like the wild west and centralized services seem like stable societies. The spirit of legality is to ensure fairness but when that doesn't happen people turn to decentralized mediums to express themselves.
Merrill 7y ago
Is there an effective way to suppress denial of service attacks in a decentralized network? Given that there are DNS root servers, isn't the internet actually centralized?
- organsnyder 7y ago
  You have to centralize somewhere—IP address assignments are also centralized.
  - blotter_paper 7y ago
    Not really -- look at CJDNS, Tor, or IPFS for examples of totally decentralised addressing schemes. These can be mapped to human readable addresses through Namecoin or Ethereum Name Service. We do centralize somewhere, but we don't have to.
zafar1 7y ago
Other good reasons to adopt self-hosted private cloud
miguelmota 7y ago
So long as ISPs are centralized, it doesn’t matter if everyone has their own IPv6 address because ISPs are gatekeepers that can censor requests.
amilein7minutes 7y ago
Sorry for the naive question but can anyone explain why hosting an IPv6-only server can help with decentralization? As a provider of some service, say you have a website where you publish some work, is there any advantage of setting it up as an IPv6 server?
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  Yes and no. You can build centralization on every layer of the network stack. Facebook is centralization on the application layer. The problem is that with IP addresses being as rare as they are in the ipv4 space you have a lot of tricks that you need to use and ultimately you go through someone using a real ipv4 address. Ipv6 doesn't have that, so it lets you decentralize further down the stack. While this is good in its own right, currently we don't have issues with ip address monopolies, unlike application layer monopolies. And that's the problem we have. Doesn't matter how many open layers you have, someone can always build a closed system on top of them.
djsumdog 7y ago
I wrote an article about just the e-commerce aspect of this a few weeks back: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-death-of-the-mom-and-pop-e-store/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-death-of-the-mom-and-pop-... There are fewer and fewer websites with things for sale. Everyone puts their stuff on an Amazon, eBay, Newegg, Etsy or Reverb store. The big carriers are the store-of-stores. Some people setup a Shopify or other site as well, but it's usually secondary, or it's to sell merch for another thing like webcomic or blog.
clarkmoody 7y ago
Local-first software development[1][2] could also be a force for decentralization, since you don't need a coordination server to hold the authoritative version of a document. The relevant protocol for discussion is the CRDT (conflict-free, replicated data type). [1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804478 (6 months ago)
zemo 7y ago
this article doesn't deal at all with DNS so kinda misses like the biggest centralization flaw on the internet but whatever
marknadal 7y ago
The Internet Archive (parent of the Wayback Machine, Top 300 website in the world) is doing a lot to help re-decentralize the web. Check out this post for more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685682
neilobremski 7y ago
As someone who works in the domain name industry, I'd like to note that there is ever increasing pressure to police domain name use. When you buy and use a generic TLD such as "com" or "ninja", you are buying a US product and it is subject to sanction laws and other things you may not realize. CC TLDs (two characters long like "ch") are products of that country and have their own laws UNLESS the registry company is located in the US - in which case it is also subject to sanctions. I point this out because unless you get everyone using your IPv6 address directly, your name is certainly NOT decentralized.
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  > As someone who works in the domain name industry Do you have any opinions on Namecoin and/or Ethereum Name Service? I'm not looking for an argument, just genuinely curious what somebody in the industry thinks.
- austhrow743 7y ago
  Any thoughts on which TLDs are least susceptible to shenanigans?
  - number6 7y ago
    Decentralized ones like provided by OpenNic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNIC

300 points by telmich 7y ago

nicey 7y ago

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted/ https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted/

telmich 7y ago
Very nice one - thanks for the pointer, I'll even add it to the blog!
- telmich 7y ago
  ... and updated.
dooglius 7y ago
Does anyone else find it ironic that this is hosted on GitHub?
- sooheon 7y ago
  Even the mode of presentation ("awesome-$FOO") is a very uniform meme.
nebulon 7y ago
If you want to selfhost many of those apps, we have built a tool (Cloudron) to take away most of the deployment hassle for many of those apps mentioned in the link. Also to work around the provider lock-in with ipv4 addresses while hosting from your home or on-premise we have a built-in dynamic DNS feature https://cloudron.io/documentation/networking/#dynamic-dns https://cloudron.io/documentation/networking/#dynamic-dns So in the end it doesn't matter if you change ISP or if you don't even have a static ipv4 as such.
- olah_1 7y ago
  Cloudron is missing apps for most use cases I actually care about. Can you add a google photos type app? Maybe Piwigo (it has a good mobile app) or OwnPhotos[1] (it has face/object recognition). Lychee doesn't have a mobile app or face/object recognition. Can you add some communication apps like Matrix Synapse or Ejabberd? Mattermost is walled off from the outside world. Can you add some social apps like Pleroma or Mastodon? [1]: https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos
  - nebulon 7y ago
    I wasn't very much aware of ownphotos looks great and will add it to our backlog. Thanks! Otherwise, Matrix+Riot is being worked on already. Mastodon is similarly mostly done https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/1136/mastodon-microblogging https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/1136/mastodon-microblogging Our latest addition is now OnlyOffice, currently in testing mode.
  - shuriky 7y ago
    Well, Cloudron provides apps for most use cases most people need. So the fact that you need some obscure apps doesn't invalidate Cloudron as a great solution. I've been using it for a long time and love what it has to offer. Plus the devs are great and keep working on making it better.
- anderspitman 7y ago
  I think something like Sandstorm/Cloudron is the way forward with decentralization. I'm more than happy to pay someone else to manage all my services for me. But I see where my apps are hosted as the least interesting question. The important issue for me is lock-in. How easy would it be to switch if Cloudron does something I don't like, or if they outright ban me for some reason? If it's easy to switch, that keeps incentives aligned and fosters competition and progress. Does Cloudron do anything to mitigate lock-in?
  - nebulon 7y ago
    Since the whole stack runs on your server there is no real way to ban anyone as such. Worst case is that you would loose access to updates, however all our app packages are MIT licensed (eg. https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/nextcloud-app https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/nextcloud-app ) as such you could just build the app image with docker locally and push to your server manually.
shuriky 7y ago
+1 for Cloudron

Temasik 7y ago

https://bitcoinsv.com/en/learn/independence-day https://bitcoinsv.com/en/learn/independence-day < this is the tool

oakejp12 7y ago

I may be somewhat confused, but how would a different IP address/system prevent centralized services? It seems to me that the same market problems, the strong vendor lock-ins explained in the post, will still persist in IPv6. There's no mention of how/why IPv6 solves those problems, just that they do...

telmich 7y ago
It doesn't prevent them, but with IPv6 everyone can take back control. With IPv4, you are unable to get a decent amount of public addresses to run your service (if you are not having tons of money already).
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  You are talking about lower layer protocols here that don't matter for decentralization. In fact, a decentralized transport protocol can be made that doesn't require your ISP to give you an internet routable IP address nor put you behind NAT. Think e-mail, for example. It never required you to have an internet routable IP addresses to communicate with anyone. There were and are plenty of local networks where people run local SMTP servers that communicate with upstream SMTP servers over local network and only those have public IP addresses to communicate with SMTP servers over public internet.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  > with IPv6 everyone can take back control Any service provider can just decide not to route consumer-facing IPv6 addresses. It's not like we all had tons of our own free routable static IPv4 addresses two decades ago, you still had to get them allocated from a service provider and have them route to you, and be allowed to host services. They're "giving away" IPv6 routing and allocation right now, but there is absolutely nothing stopping them from ending that practice. You only have the control they allow you to have.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Like, I would feel like "I have my own dedicated global address nobody can take from me" is a decentralizing factor... But at the end of the day I still need my ISP to get me to the Internet, so not really.

hkjhreiou 7y ago

So what's the latest deal with IPv6? IPv4 was supposed to run out and the Internet come crashing down 5 years ago, yet here we are, and everything seems just fine, while a billion smartphones were added.

tambre 7y ago
> while a billion smartphones were added A huge number of them being on IPv6-only mobile networks using NAT64 to access the old Internet.
telmich 7y ago
That was a really bad miscommunication - especially as we are running out of IPv4 in Europe this month. - see https://ungleich.ch/u/blog/when-does-ripe-run-out-of-ipv4-addresses/ https://ungleich.ch/u/blog/when-does-ripe-run-out-of-ipv4-ad...

explodingcamera 7y ago

Missed a really cool vanity url opportunity :)

jasode 7y ago

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits. However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche groups but I don't see it becoming mainstream. To purposely be provocative to spur discussion, I will make a bold claim: Decentralization is an unstable equilibrium. It's the centralization that becomes the stable status quo. If tpcip protocol and http protocol are already decentralized, why do we have centralized services that have "too much power" such as Facebook/Google/Youtube? It's because different actors can spend more money on their particular http node than other http nodes. Those unequal economic forces is what makes decentralization tend towards centralization. There is no technical protocol specification that can prevent that. E.g. if Git protocol is decentralized, why is there so much concentration on Github? It's because John doesn't want to install a git server on his laptop and punch a DMZ hole through his home router and leave his laptop up & running 24 hours a day to serve up his git repo. He'd rather spend the weekend playing with his children. And Jane doesn't want to spend $30 on a Raspberry Pi and install Gitlab on it to serve up her git repo. Multiply John and Jane's by a million other devs with their own various reasons for not serving up their git repos in a decentralized manner and the emergent phenomenon you get is something like Github. See the trend? Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not wanting to (1) spend money and (2) not wanting to spend extra time -- to fulfill ideals of decentralization. I wish we would discuss the above factors much more often and there were more articles about it.

telmich 7y ago
Love the challenge. Let me start by replying to your DMZ comment: with IPv6, you actually have to rethink and with it you can organise the Internet very different from today. I agree with you that people don't want to maintain complex systems. But then again, running a git server or even cgit, is a matter of little minutes spent, especially if you use ready to deploy toolchains. I also think you have a point in terms of equilibrium - people are in general more comfortable with something they know. And due to the long history of IPv4 shortage, people are used to having private IPv4 space only. It is like animals in a zoo - we don't know anymore, how good the life used to be with public IPv4 addresses, we have grown up without them. What I have seen from many discussions and visits in the last months is that IT startups are now reconsidering and embracing IPv6, because it gives freedom. I'd also say the approach is not to directly replace facebook & co., but to think completely different. Why do I need a website to write to you? I can write directly to you, if both of us are on an IPv6 network. Thinking different is the key for decentralisation.

peterwwillis 7y ago

The internet will not stop being decentralized just because there are some consumer product monopolies. When Amazon starts running its own dark fiber, and you can only use that fiber to buy shoes that are only sold on Amazon, then part of the internet will be close to being centralized. But that would still just be a small part of it, and it still won't happen entirely. There's a very long tail between Amazon and the user. How does Amazon connect to the user? Sure, it starts in their datacenter. But then immediately they need to connect to multiple points of presence, which means multiple bundles of fiber going in different directions. And so you'd say, sure, Amazon has lots of DCs, so they could just run dark fiber between all of them. But they're not _everywhere_, so they need to eventually peer to a more global network. Eventually you get to the ISP. There's two kinds of ISPs: wired and wireless. While they're increasingly the same company, there is a wealth of technology, expense, competition, and physical infrastructure wrapped up in each. Copper and fiber runs to every home, customer support, billing, management, contracts with public and private entities. There's multiple companies in these industries that are bigger than Amazon. Say Amazon becomes its own ISP. They can either run fiber to every home (lol) or become their own nationwide wireless ILEC (lol) or they can become an MVNO and rent access to an ISP's gear (possible) or they can just pay internet backbones to peer with them and get access to all ISPs' customers. The first two would basically be like making a brand new Comcast; uh, good luck with that. The third is what Comcast already does: they rent ILEC's networks to provide their own mobile service, capturing more customers. The last is how the internet operates today: the ISP deals with the complexity of getting everyone in the country online, and Amazon just pays to connect to POPs. In a non-net-neutrality world, any ISP can add a line-item to your bill for you to get access to Amazon. In that case, Amazon becoming an ISP avoids that, capturing more profit in the process. But why in "Bob"'s name go through all that work, when you can just charge people individually to access your website? Aka, Amazon Prime. So in order to completely control your access to shoes, they can either build an ISP, or just..... use existing ISPs. Currently, most ISPs aren't adding line-items to access Amazon, so the latter works fine. In another bizzaro possibility, Amazon could merge with every ISP in America, creating a hyperconglomerate, so only Americans could access Amazon, and every ISP bill is charged for Prime, and every non-American ISP has to pay to route traffic to Amazon. I think that would just crush Amazon's sales, but it's possible. But still the internet would be decentralized, at least globally. And one final option that actually already exists in developing nations: Amazon and a handful of other monopolies subsidize ISPs to create a "bare-bones" internet plan, where you literally can only surf to Facebook, Amazon, and Google, but you only pay $10 a month. This would be a consumer-only internet that is totally centralized and monopolized - but it's still not the whole internet. Then of course there's every other business in the world that is not consumer-oriented, all of whom depend on the internet for their business. They also have an interest in a decentralized internet, because it helps them compete with each other, too. They'd be happy to fund a decentralized internet, if only for themselves. This is all besides the fact that decentralization is actually an architectural decision made by a central organization - the DoD. They made it decentralized because it just works better, not because they wanted the whole world to hold hands and sing kumbaya. Even in this fantasy world of a centralized internet, with one company managing all the consumer services, b2b services, and internet connections, they'd still keep a decentralized architecture, because they know it's really friggin' robust. The network architecture has nothing to do with who has control. If your concern is monopolies, an internet protocol does not change this at all. If your concern is being able to host your own services, that's still at the discretion of your ISP.

mapgrep 7y ago

The article calls ipv6 an “easy way” to decentralize but I don’t see it. If you click the link on how to get your own ipv6 space you get two options: Ask your ISP for an address or set up a tunnel to someone else who will give you one. These are the same options we have today for ipv4. I went on my crappy large ISP’s website. They are not handing out static ipv6. Why would they? The problem has always been more about corporate power than tech.

thu2111 7y ago
That'll change with time. I'm behind ISP NAT for IPv4 but have static IPv6 direct to all my devices in the home. My ISP ran out of IPv4 relatively early so had to go this way. On the other hand, this won't really change much for the firewall issues named above. Computers are too insecure to expose them all to the internet, all the time. We'd need pretty radical changes in how software is written to create a truly flat worldwide network (which has never existed before).

hirundo 7y ago

This underlines the positive side of Tall Poppy Syndrome. Envy has a number of serious down sides, including making the sufferer miserable for, usually, very little return. But when people stop using an Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc., because they are successful, it creates a counter-force to centralization. Like hate, when well directed, envy can be good. Like hate, it can easily get out of control and cause great damage, up to and including genocides.

dgb23 7y ago
Envy might be a factor but I feel like wanting freedom and mistrusting authorities/corporations are stronger here.

foobar_ 7y ago

Some random thoughts on centralization vs decentralization. In theory, IPv6 allows every human, pet, alien and robot to have an address. Each address can host let's say the following services 1. info - dns 2. data transfer - ftp/http/p2p/... 3. communication - email/voip/... 4. entertainment - game server/media server/... Right now the biggest problems with decentralisation are 1. ownership of hardware 2. assigning of address and interfacing with the network. 3. configuration and setup of services 4. scalability of the service 5. using decentralized stuff for illegal activities I think 2 and 3 is the biggest win improving decentralized services and getting rid of facebook and the like. Why are two and 3 still hard? This will also make decentralized services appealing to normal folks. The biggest challenge to making decentralized services mainstream is 5. Hardware is manufactured by a few monopolies and they impose some restrictions and tracking abilities. The assigning of an address is done by the telecom and they have some rules, regulations and tracking abilities. Each country right now is setting up new rules and regulations for the data that comes into it. As configuring and the setting up of stuff is hard we once again have a few major services. The illegal activity makes decentralized services seem like the wild west and centralized services seem like stable societies. The spirit of legality is to ensure fairness but when that doesn't happen people turn to decentralized mediums to express themselves.

Merrill 7y ago

Is there an effective way to suppress denial of service attacks in a decentralized network? Given that there are DNS root servers, isn't the internet actually centralized?

organsnyder 7y ago
You have to centralize somewhere—IP address assignments are also centralized.
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  Not really -- look at CJDNS, Tor, or IPFS for examples of totally decentralised addressing schemes. These can be mapped to human readable addresses through Namecoin or Ethereum Name Service. We do centralize somewhere, but we don't have to.

zafar1 7y ago

Other good reasons to adopt self-hosted private cloud

miguelmota 7y ago

So long as ISPs are centralized, it doesn’t matter if everyone has their own IPv6 address because ISPs are gatekeepers that can censor requests.

amilein7minutes 7y ago

Sorry for the naive question but can anyone explain why hosting an IPv6-only server can help with decentralization? As a provider of some service, say you have a website where you publish some work, is there any advantage of setting it up as an IPv6 server?

buzzkillington 7y ago
Yes and no. You can build centralization on every layer of the network stack. Facebook is centralization on the application layer. The problem is that with IP addresses being as rare as they are in the ipv4 space you have a lot of tricks that you need to use and ultimately you go through someone using a real ipv4 address. Ipv6 doesn't have that, so it lets you decentralize further down the stack. While this is good in its own right, currently we don't have issues with ip address monopolies, unlike application layer monopolies. And that's the problem we have. Doesn't matter how many open layers you have, someone can always build a closed system on top of them.

djsumdog 7y ago

I wrote an article about just the e-commerce aspect of this a few weeks back: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-death-of-the-mom-and-pop-e-store/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-death-of-the-mom-and-pop-... There are fewer and fewer websites with things for sale. Everyone puts their stuff on an Amazon, eBay, Newegg, Etsy or Reverb store. The big carriers are the store-of-stores. Some people setup a Shopify or other site as well, but it's usually secondary, or it's to sell merch for another thing like webcomic or blog.

clarkmoody 7y ago

Local-first software development[1][2] could also be a force for decentralization, since you don't need a coordination server to hold the authoritative version of a document. The relevant protocol for discussion is the CRDT (conflict-free, replicated data type). [1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804478 (6 months ago)

zemo 7y ago

this article doesn't deal at all with DNS so kinda misses like the biggest centralization flaw on the internet but whatever

marknadal 7y ago

The Internet Archive (parent of the Wayback Machine, Top 300 website in the world) is doing a lot to help re-decentralize the web. Check out this post for more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685682

neilobremski 7y ago

As someone who works in the domain name industry, I'd like to note that there is ever increasing pressure to police domain name use. When you buy and use a generic TLD such as "com" or "ninja", you are buying a US product and it is subject to sanction laws and other things you may not realize. CC TLDs (two characters long like "ch") are products of that country and have their own laws UNLESS the registry company is located in the US - in which case it is also subject to sanctions. I point this out because unless you get everyone using your IPv6 address directly, your name is certainly NOT decentralized.

blotter_paper 7y ago
> As someone who works in the domain name industry Do you have any opinions on Namecoin and/or Ethereum Name Service? I'm not looking for an argument, just genuinely curious what somebody in the industry thinks.
austhrow743 7y ago
Any thoughts on which TLDs are least susceptible to shenanigans?
- number6 7y ago
  Decentralized ones like provided by OpenNic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNIC