agreed, if you want to look at it in terms of infrastructure then the commonplace ocurrence of people flocking to certain platforms because others are already there also favors the formation of a smaller amount of sites who can sustain the growth needed to give space to what ultimately became billions of people through its snowballing
and now nobody can compete with them, because no one has the capacity to build up once more that spiraling combination of millions of dollars and millions of users, so now they seem to be here to stay with nothing practical beyond them
as centralized as can be

Probably, yeah. I'm sure there will still be pockets of resistance and we're basically on one, but people will always take the path of least resistance and the fastest option as well.

What you quoted sounds like AI generated garbage babble.

>This information is not made available to us as individuals. Even if it were, it would not be the kind of information we could use. It’s only useful en masse—in other words, only insofar as it makes us legible and visible to centralized institutions
what?


>The centralizing trend that we have seen over the lifespan of the internet is not a fluke to be corrected as we learn to properly harness the power of this new technology. Rather, the internet cannot be anything but a centralizing force, so long as there are groups that are situated to disproportionately benefit from that which it renders visible.
what???

I don't understand any of it, but it's gestalt reminds me of arguing in favor of monopolies. I hate it.

>>1341
I do not agree and here is why;

The internet as original designed had two major features that made it very important for the times it was designed in. 1) It allowed two or more computers to talk to each other over unreliable connections. 2) It allowed data to be stored in multiple locations around the United States/the west where it could be recovered if needed.

Never forget the internet was originally designed in the cold war era with the goal of ensuring that no matter what happened there would be at least one location left that would continue to run the Government and jump start other computers/server should they be destroyed or knocked offline. It was designed in a way that these computers could communicate even over the most spotty and slow connections. Landlines, radio links and even through single sideband Morse code if needed.

The TCP/IP standard itself has several built-in features designed around there being near unlimited nodes within the global network. All of which are ignored and go unused on the modern internet due to censorship. I assure you the Government's important stuff isn't being hosted like the modern web is hosted (or your personal traffic). The important data is being mirrored in untold numbers of servers and backed up by servers who's only job is to pipe data between them.

In fact, the internet and software running on top of it always works better, faster and is more stable if you take advantage of the inherent duplication features of TCP/IP.

Up until about the late 90s/early 2000s most everything online was designed with this in mind. Standards were followed to ensure different systems could communicate with each other. Data was mirrored in multiple locations whenever possible. Before they turned http into something it should have never been we saw this with all interactive software. Just compare a network of email servers like USENET to a forum, imageboard or modern social network. USENET can never be taken down and even if your local mail server goes offline there are millions others you can connect to with the same content. If you push content to one server in the network it's almost instantly mirrored everywhere. This is very different from modern web applications where you're screwed if the website goes offline. Even if the website is backed by an army of servers it becomes impossible to access it should its reverse proxy/one public IP is knocked offline somehow. Mail servers aren't like that. There are millions of IPs with the same content to connect to instead.

In the late 90s/early 2000s we saw the rise of p2p software. It allowed people to share and host files for free that were mirrored globally almost instantly. We'd been using mail for this for a long time but the new p2p networks allowed you to share large files without breaking them into small pieces. Soon after we saw the backlash from the copyright mafia. They sued everyone and lobbied to have all the p2p networks shut down. So now instead of streaming video from a global swarm of peers you're forced to access it through the web using a service like youtube. Where it can be censored and lost forever.

Centralization was forced upon the internet. The internet was never designed with centralization in mind and it makes everything worse. Some examples;

Even with the censorship issue aside centralization ends up causing far more data to be transported over the limited global bandwidth. In a true p2p network or even a semi-p2p network high traffic data is mirrored on local nodes. Thus allowing the user to fetch it from a server nearer to their location. In a centralized model this data must be transported long distances every time a user requests it. We see companies like google and netflix leasing so-called edge servers in ISP data centers all over the world. This allows them to avoid this problem. But it's a p2p for me and not for thee type of situation. On a free internet those edge servers would host everyone's content. Whatever is viral today would be sitting on them in a cache.

The cold hard truth is they centralized the internet for censorship/control and now they're attempting to justify it by claiming it's a better model. It's not. We've known since the 1920s it's not a better model for this problem. If it were better we wouldn't have designed POTS and radio networks the way we did. Computers are just the same thing with more bandwidth.

Another thing I should mention are protocols. We're supposed to have multiple protocols like http for different uses. We used to have this before "web 2.0". But now everything is forced to run over http. They do that again because it allows them to control content. If your interactive network aware applications ran over a simple protocol that wasn't in the web browser it would cause a lot of problems for them. The last thing they want is multiple standards designed by hobbyist. We've stifled innovation for the last 2 decades all in the name of censorship and control of the global network by a small number of people.

>>1351
Some examples of what you should have right now;

1) There should be a global file system/datastore like IPFS that you can access from any machine and interact with the files hosted therein like they're local files. Anyone taking part in this global file system would mirror a small amount of data for others to ensure it would always be available. Viral files would be pushed to multiple nodes should they become popular to ensure everyone could get them faster and for network stability in general.

2) Instead of relying on multiple streaming services and social networks instead every family/house would have its own personal media server. You could share the contents of it with the global network if you wanted. But the main use would be to store your families media and access it from whatever device you wanted both in the home and while you're away from home.

3) Internet-aware applications would be truly internet aware instead of glorified web browsers. They would behave and run just like native applications. There would be a simple standard to ensure they could work on any type of system

4) There would be a truly free web-like document store+standard to allow anyone to publish content that others could read. It would be impossible to censor or take anything down. Once it's uploaded it's there forever. You could push updates but old versions would always be stored/mirrored somewhere on the global network. Anyone could publish to it for free.

There are many other uses of course. These are just a few. One VERY IMPORTANT point is with a truly free and open internet the copyright laws would have been changed. Meaning all content is suddenly allowed to be remixed. Imagine if every type of content was the same as 2hu stuff. Now imagine a world where people are expressing themselves with it without fear of having it taken down or getting sued. That's the kind of world we should be living in right now.

We should have advanced at least 60 more years in just the last 25 or so during the "information age". We should be living in Renaissance 2.0. We aren't due to censorship and centralization.

>>1351
>We see companies like google and netflix leasing so-called edge servers in ISP data centers all over the world. This allows them to avoid this problem. But it's a p2p for me and not for thee type of situation.
That's the entire point of the article though. Big tech companies can lease a large amount of servers because they have the money and political capital to do so, something which the common don't have. Even though the internet protocol is decentralized, it's a system where every node has equal standing; so whoever can pay to control the largest amount of them have the largest control over the entire system, which in turn gives them even more money and control.

>On a free internet those edge servers would host everyone's content.
No. They host the contents of the ones who pay for it. The internet doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's backed by physical hardware and electricity, which cost money. No one can host significant amount of content for free. Big tech can afford to do it because they sell your data, exactly the article's point. Common persons don't have any capacity to do this, and they don't want to pay either.

>>1351
doggy

>>1353
Energy would be free is nuclear power and other sources of power were not demonized on purpose. What you have to understand is it's a system of control. Money IS control.

We don't have to have communism to have good for the common man. We just have to not let a few people treat us like we're less than people. They stifle innovation to retain control over the population. That's the only reason things are like this.

What we need are laws that say things like:
>All data is free
>Transporting data over the global common network is a human right

If the Constitution of the USA was written today it would say DATA instead of SPEECH.

>Common persons don't have any capacity to do this, and they don't want to pay either.
I pay hundreds of dollars a month to host several TB of content on my home network that I can access anywhere in the world. Even with the current situation it's more than possible for each and every home to have its own little home server. Which churns away hosting and serving content. Both content you put on it yourself and a small datastore where you're hosting content for others.

Hell most ISPs now already let other people access the bandwidth you're paying for. They call it "mobile wifi" or whatever. It allows other customers to log-in to their accounts via the router/modem in everyone else's home.

As they say; you don't know how bad things really are.

>>1350
ZERO reading comprehension ZILCH NADA

>>1353
>That's the entire point of the article though. Big tech companies can lease a large amount of servers because they have the money and political capital to do so, something which the common don't have. Even though the internet protocol is decentralized, it's a system where every node has equal standing; so whoever can pay to control the largest amount of them have the largest control over the entire system, which in turn gives them even more money and control.
whats the point of the OP then? because this sounds entirely political.
It's not inevitable.
It's ABSOLUTELY something that should be corrected.
It's not at all inherent to the internet.