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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 centr

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.
  - wbl 3y ago
    Bad big in transitive bgp data parsing will take out all networking from one vendor.

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.
- wbl 3y ago
  Bad big in transitive bgp data parsing will take out all networking from one vendor.