5 ms·

Most people blame Cloudflare and Amazon for centralizing everything. I actually disagree; the centralization is a symptom of severe, systemic, unfixable flaws

Most people blame Cloudflare and Amazon for centralizing everything. I actually disagree; the centralization is a symptom of severe, systemic, unfixable flaws in the design of the internet itself. At least we didn't let AOL define internet.

djbusby 3y ago
Such as?
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  1. DDoS Attacks 2. Port scanning attacks 3. Geolocation attacks (you shouldn't run a server from your home, when your IP Address could be used to find you; be it from a hack or an abuse of the legal process) 4. The US internet relying on a backbone mostly operated by 4 companies (meaning a direct connection is a massive perk) For as much as we moan about Amazon and Cloudflare centralizing things; believe me, just taking out Level 3 / Lumen would be almost an act of war and would affect every ISP and cloud provider. If you took out Lumen, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, and AT&T, just those 3 companies; that's 2.35 million kilometers of fiber going dark. For reference, Comcast has "only" 150,000 km.
  - djbusby 3y ago
    Those are problem and symptoms - not design flaws. How could one design a system that doesn't let DDoS exist on the network?
  - silisili 3y ago
    I actually have a lot of respect for the big backbones. If Goog/MS/Amz owned them all, they'd find some way to wall it off from everyone else. If Comcast or Charter owned them all, our internet would cost about $1000 a month by now. All things considered, IMO they've been fairly good and fair stewards.
justin_oaks 3y ago
I'd appreciate if you'd elaborate on that. (Edit: I see you elaborated somewhat in another comment posted before I finished this comment) I tend to think centralization is more about people's tendencies than it is internet design. As I see it, centralization on the internet happens as the emergent behavior of all of the elements in the system and the forces that exist. In other words, it's the natural result of incentives. People use centralized services because - prices (economies of scale) - network effects ("I can't certain people without WhatsApp") - social pressures ("People look at me weird when I say I don't have an Instagram") - visibility ("There are other CRMs than SalesForce?") - making choices easy ("I don't want to choose between all these options. I'll pick the most familiar") - safety ("Nobody got fired for choosing IBM") - convenience ("It's a pain to self-host") - security ("Google probably protects data better than I can") - etc
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  True; but let's imagine everyone self-hosted. Perfectly decentralized. As I edited another comment to reflect, imagine if you took out just three companies. Level 3 Communications / Lumen; AT&T; Verizon Enterprise. With those three, you've knocked 2.35 million km, or 1.46 million miles, of fiber optic offline. That's over half of the US backbone in those three companies. Comcast "only" has 0.15 million miles for the sake of comparison. The internet would crash and burn immediately to speeds not seen since the dial-up era. There's nothing we can do about that. Cloudflare and AWS centralizing everything is actually, statistically, less risky than backbone attacks. If you succeeded in knocking down all of the big seven at once; you've got about 80-90% of the backbone offline plus all of the online cloud providers with direct connections to them; at which point the internet would cease to function in any practical sense.
  - DoctorOW 3y ago
    I don't think this is more centralized, because it requires taking out multiple companies services. To take down three of these networking companies at once is something we've never actually seen, and that's the level needed to be comparable to a CloudFlare failure.

djbusby 3y ago

Such as?

gjsman-1000 3y ago
1. DDoS Attacks 2. Port scanning attacks 3. Geolocation attacks (you shouldn't run a server from your home, when your IP Address could be used to find you; be it from a hack or an abuse of the legal process) 4. The US internet relying on a backbone mostly operated by 4 companies (meaning a direct connection is a massive perk) For as much as we moan about Amazon and Cloudflare centralizing things; believe me, just taking out Level 3 / Lumen would be almost an act of war and would affect every ISP and cloud provider. If you took out Lumen, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, and AT&T, just those 3 companies; that's 2.35 million kilometers of fiber going dark. For reference, Comcast has "only" 150,000 km.
- djbusby 3y ago
  Those are problem and symptoms - not design flaws. How could one design a system that doesn't let DDoS exist on the network?
- silisili 3y ago
  I actually have a lot of respect for the big backbones. If Goog/MS/Amz owned them all, they'd find some way to wall it off from everyone else. If Comcast or Charter owned them all, our internet would cost about $1000 a month by now. All things considered, IMO they've been fairly good and fair stewards.

justin_oaks 3y ago

I'd appreciate if you'd elaborate on that. (Edit: I see you elaborated somewhat in another comment posted before I finished this comment) I tend to think centralization is more about people's tendencies than it is internet design. As I see it, centralization on the internet happens as the emergent behavior of all of the elements in the system and the forces that exist. In other words, it's the natural result of incentives. People use centralized services because - prices (economies of scale) - network effects ("I can't certain people without WhatsApp") - social pressures ("People look at me weird when I say I don't have an Instagram") - visibility ("There are other CRMs than SalesForce?") - making choices easy ("I don't want to choose between all these options. I'll pick the most familiar") - safety ("Nobody got fired for choosing IBM") - convenience ("It's a pain to self-host") - security ("Google probably protects data better than I can") - etc

gjsman-1000 3y ago
True; but let's imagine everyone self-hosted. Perfectly decentralized. As I edited another comment to reflect, imagine if you took out just three companies. Level 3 Communications / Lumen; AT&T; Verizon Enterprise. With those three, you've knocked 2.35 million km, or 1.46 million miles, of fiber optic offline. That's over half of the US backbone in those three companies. Comcast "only" has 0.15 million miles for the sake of comparison. The internet would crash and burn immediately to speeds not seen since the dial-up era. There's nothing we can do about that. Cloudflare and AWS centralizing everything is actually, statistically, less risky than backbone attacks. If you succeeded in knocking down all of the big seven at once; you've got about 80-90% of the backbone offline plus all of the online cloud providers with direct connections to them; at which point the internet would cease to function in any practical sense.
- DoctorOW 3y ago
  I don't think this is more centralized, because it requires taking out multiple companies services. To take down three of these networking companies at once is something we've never actually seen, and that's the level needed to be comparable to a CloudFlare failure.