Essentially it's a separation of concerns. The content "address" (i.e. how we specify the content that is desired) and the content "location" (i.e. the connecti

Essentially it's a separation of concerns. The content "address" (i.e. how we specify the content that is desired) and the content "location" (i.e. the connections which serve the content associated with an "address") are distinct. An "address" is also self validating. Hash addressing, where a hash of the data is the address of the data, are use to accomplish this. This is useful in many contexts and an [extra few bits][1] on the the front allow an address to represent much much more. "location" is by default a distributed hash table enabling the fulling distributed routing of content and by uses [Kademlia][0]. But the software could easily be configured to with fixed values for the hash table mapping any "address" to the same location which happens to be a cloud provider. Could you elaborate on what you mean by "anyone who keeps their API locked down is unlikely to adopt standard IPFS."? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia [2]: https://github.com/multiformats/cid#how-does-it-work https://github.com/multiformats/cid#how-does-it-work