No. Centralizing control of something that was designed to be distributed is what is stupid.
The Internet is supposed to be distributed. We've gotten so used to consolidated services that we have forgotten this lesson.
The Internet is supposed to be distributed. We've gotten so used to consolidated services that we have forgotten this lesson.
What is relevant is governance. We allow billionaires and venture capitalists to govern a commons that we all rely on. Surprise surprise, it isn't going well.
The solution is not to have (difficult to scale) federated alternatives. The solution is collective ownership.
Imagine for a moment that the multinationals that are increasingly in charge of our lives were owned by their customers. Imagine they had a fair electoral system, reflecting the variety of those users, limiting them to one person, one vote, and that their constitutions were designed to guarantee the rights of minorities.
The journey that most countries went on through the 20th and 21st centuries, in other words.
Tech giants and other multinationals are a different kind of beast, because they govern a little slice of our lives instead of having carte blanche. But it is not beyond the realm of possibility for democratically operated multinationals to exist. It will be hard to do, but IMO, that approach has a bright future because non-techies can grasp it and participate in it more easily, and that is one less barrier to a runaway network effect than the fediverse has.
Sounds like the issues we currently have with democracy.
Centralizing control of something that was designed to be distributed
It’s also not a very interesting problem to solve because of the type of cliffs you will run into due to precisely how the “internet works”