> The World Wide Web was initially designed to be decentralized, with the idea that anyone connecting to the internet could host a web server. Yeah not really.

> The World Wide Web was initially designed to be decentralized, with the idea that anyone connecting to the internet could host a web server. Yeah not really. If the Web was designed to be decentralized it would have used URNs as content identifiers instead of URLs. A URL is specific to a scheme (means of access) and authority (where to access). A decentralized system would use URNs and any host that could service a request could return the resource. Once a resource was in "the Web" it would be accessible to future requests even if the original source went offline. This sort of mirroring can be built on top of the Web (CDNs, traditional mirrors, etc) but it is not a foundational component. The authority providing a resource needs to online for that resource to be available.