Information Civics – What’s the point of a decentralized Web

I’m self submitting my pretentious essay because I wanted to respond to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25312854, “Maybe we don’t want a decentralized Web.”

Decentralization is about authority models in networks. The challenge with protocols is that they often bake authority models into the technical design, and that creates a set of systemic effects which are hard to fix at scale.

I don’t think we should talk about decentralization as there being no authority. We should talk about it as a programmable authority layer.