> The infrastructure you use has a contractual relationship with you, which implicitly relies on contract law. You have something better than distributed system

> The infrastructure you use has a contractual relationship with you, which implicitly relies on contract law. You have something better than distributed systems here, you have economic incentives and courts. My point actually is that this is only locally true, not globally. As long as you live within the realm of one superpower, then the laws of countries close to that superpower will apply. Beyond that, nobody cares. Do you think having a contract with AWS would prevent them from cutting you out if you are in an embargoed country? Of course not Do you think local user privacy laws would prevent Google from handing over your mails to the US government if they want to have it? Of course not Ultimately, even global mega corporations are not "government free". Each and every one of them has a _country of major importance_ to which it will comply. Governments around the world are perfectly aware of that, and the very foundations of internet infrastructure, as of now, are still heavily biased toward western countries. The US has shown already that it can unilaterally erase the DNS of a website domiciled in a foreign country because it broke US laws, through pressure on root DNS servers. > Also note that the infrastructure behind the internet also isn't particularly distributed as you describe Indeed, but the problem I see currently is that internet manipulation can be done unbeknownst to it's users. No US internet user knows which websites were barred from having a DNS. No Chinese internet user knows which websites aren't accessible. Etc. Governments can have it both ways: let the population think they have internet access without realizing all the nits and bits that were removed. I would like to see an internet that is "all or nothing". You cannot temper it without obviously destroying it. That would mean for instance stopping to use IP for content addressing, and add a randomized anycast on top of it, etc.