In what way do you think the web is centralized?
For starters: navigating the web in the beginning consisted of clicking links which caused you to go from one website to another. This all worked well when (a) the web was small and (b) there were (hardly) no trash pages.
Search engines changed that, and once they got 'good enough' the link graph became a mere starting point for crawling the web rather than the way we navigated from site to site. For a little while the link graph was used as a popularity measurement but this too changed (because of the huge number of low value links).
Then we got silos. A 'silo' is a bunch of data locked up under a trade between users and large web properties. The trade is 'you give us your content and a bunch of information about yourself and we'll use that content to attract others and to sell ads'.
Examples of such silos are Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
Finally, if originally (and the internet itself) was strung together by a peer-to-peer approach it turned more and more into a division between producers and consumers, with the producers on the 'server' side and the consumers on the 'client' side.
Mobile devices accessing the net further accelerated this trend, right now the only internet (not web) applications that are still peer-to-peer are torrent applications. For the most part the division on the web is complete and hosting a web server on your very powerful cable modem or DSL line would be grounds for termination of your access.
Servers are hosted centrally and are operated by companies whereas clients are simply terminals that access the content stored on those servers.
I hope that answers your question in enough detail, you could easily write a book about this.
That said, I agree there is a clear move towards our data and services being handled by fewer, and larger entities, such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. But they aren't a single entity, and I don't consider that centralized. Any one of those providers could implode today, and very little of their services could not be picked up by some competitor easily. I don't consider that centralized.
Your peer-to-peer view of the internet died roughly in '98.
And there are many of them, some owned by companies that use them exclusively, some conglomerations of many different providers but owned by yet another party. How is this centralization? I still think you're just arguing that we've compartmentalized certain services to sets of companies, for the most part, but even that isn't centralization, because there are multiple distinct companies using multiple distinct networks and in many cases they are presenting multiple distinct capabilities. Not having something handled at the end point does not mean it's centralized, there's a very large middle ground here, and that's where we are currently at. I'm not sure I see any evidence that we are moving away from that towards actual centralization.
> When I received mail in '95 or so the machine receiving it was the workstation I wrote the reply on.
And many people that used POP3 continued to do so well into the 2000's. It's silly to run a mail server on your workstation. I know, I did it for years myself. You run into all sorts of stupid problems related to your workstation not being always on, badly configured backup MX servers, and other issues. We don't do it anymore not because we were forced out of it (you can still do it now), but because there are solutions that are better for most use cases, and we opt for those.
We don't all wash our own cars, or do our own plumbing, or even clean our own houses. Some people do, some people pay others to do that work. The fact they pay others doesn't mean we've moved towards centralizing those services. There isn't some national bureau of plumbing that is our only recourse when the toilet is clogged and we don't want to fix it ourselves.
The reasons why we are moving to a more centralized internet are what is interesting, such as - you rightly identified those - that stuff isn't always powered up and that keeping a mailserver up and running is work and so on.
But none of that changes that centralization is happening.
Multiple distinct companies != peer-to-peer internet. That's what a decentralized network infrastructure used to mean, where the 'peers' were equals.
Nowadays it means clients in one camp and servers in another, and large scale consolidation of those servers in the datawarehouses of a relatively low number of companies serving up the bulk of the data. If that trend continues it's not a bad or a good thing per-se but it would be good to stop and think about how desirable that is.
So from that point of view a lot of centralization has already happened.
Everybody running their own mailserver: could be a good thing, presuming they can be made easy to set up and easy to maintain (I don't see any technical reason why not). Ditto webhosting, why should facebook host all your content (or google, or Yahoo).
In the end, convenience won over 'peer-to-peer', there are many reasons besides convenience (firewalls, for one) but the results are here and we'll have to live with it (except for a couple of die-hard hold-outs).
I think it is correct to say we are, or at least were, decentralizing, to a degree. I think it's correct to say that we are not fully decentralized, which we were close to initially, but I don't think it's entirely constructive to say we are moving in a direction that leads to a centralized internet, and what that implies (a single authority, even if for a single service). I think we are moving towards, or have arrived at, what we see in many markets. Large dominant players that the majority use, but with a large market of smaller players that provide for the niche needs. Take the automotive industry, for example.
I think we are largely arguing over semantics, which is something I don't want to do, but at the same time it's hard to be sure I'm not just reducing your arguments to the point there's no difference and ignoring important points at the same time.
> But none of that changes that centralization is happening.
I think it's cyclical, and there will be periods where we move along the spectrum back and forth, but I doubt we'll get as close to the decentralized end as we started at, but for many reasons. I don't think we'll get all that close to the decentralized end either though.
> Multiple distinct companies != peer-to-peer internet.
My argument has not been "we are decentralized", it's been "we are not centralized". To that effect, peer-to-peer is irrelevant to my argument, and I've tried to make that clear.
> Everybody running their own mailserver: could be a good thing, presuming they can be made easy to set up and easy to maintain (I don't see any technical reason why not). Ditto webhosting, why should facebook host all your content (or google, or Yahoo).
Because it's very, very inefficient. There are upsides to centralization (e.g. discoverability), just as there are downsides (e.g. homogeneity). I think the sweet spot that maximizes the upsides and minimizes the downsides is somewhere between decentralization and centralization.
In decentralized networks there end up being accumulation points, and Zipf's law (which shows up in piles of different contexts, originally noticed in rank of words used in languages) gives a pretty good idea of how that accumulation plays out in basically an L-shaped curve. Point being that it might have a lot more to do with the structure of human networks and attention than with choice of wire protocols...
It's true that it's decentralized, that's it's easy to create websites, but in nature, if you shut down dns servers, you shut down 99% of the internet, which inclues HTML website.
And I think that a decentralized web might be more easy to index (proof of work system, etc).
If you look at what internet.org attempted to do, that's actually how the internet is used most of the time. For consumers and most small businesses, internet is centralized. Technically, most of the internet is just http requests, meaning that there will always be this duality of servers and clients. Without web servers and their admins, there is nothing, and that's a form of control in my opinion: you can easily shut down a website.
> Without web servers and their admins, there is nothing, and that's a form of control in my opinion: you can easily shut down a website.
There are webservers, and admins. That hasn't changed. There's been a shift to larger sites, but there's still plenty of small ones. You sill have the options to put your site at many different locations, or use a platform such as Facebook, Blogger or Wordpress.
What I'm talking about, is protocols that make services impossible to shut down, like bittorrent or bitcoin. That's what I mean by a decentralized internet. Those technologies are different and were made especially with the goal of avoiding control, and they are exactly the solutions to breaches of privacy. Here every computer is equal, and that's a true decentralized internet, in term of hardware AND software. What I was talking about, is generalizing bitcoin and bittorrent to messaging or even hosting databases.
Such software would run on many domestic computers that want to use it and host chunks of data in a redundant manner. The issue is authenticity and signing of data. But other than that, that's where the future is.
I'm sorry but I can't trust the html/http web one bit. HTML and javascript are awful technologies, which are slow to parse, building web browsers have been a race that resulted in no interesting progress and the web2.0 has been a joke. All those techs have been the base google have been making its money on, which also makes easy to mine, so to me centralization is a privacy issue.
You could argue that the root servers are too centralized, and that their control constitutes centralized DNS control, but since the only reason they have control is that all the different DNS servers use them as authorities, an argument could also be made that their control is more be convention than anything else, and all it would take is a competitor to ICANN that added some value, and eventually we could have multiple authorities. Whether that would be beneficial or detrimental is another discussion.
You seem to be conflating the web with the internet.
But all if this is obviously beside the point that the OP made. Even if you don't want to develop a search engine or a phone app, you still have to tie your users to a central "cloud" service and web site so you can get discovered by google. That's a huge disincentive for p2p services.
[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/heres-how-dominant-google-is-i... [2] http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25450615
However, each and every one of those services are centralised in a technical sense on account of HTTP. Why might an alternative be useful? Consider the solution the Google service we're addressing is putting forward cf. Content Addressable Networking systems[0]. I can't spend any more time explaining, sorry. This might help- note the levels of centralisation in each generation of P2P systems:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/15-440/F12/lectures/p2p-approxim...
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_addressable_network
Forget the web as a whole and consider a single service such as HN. That graph has |clients| >> |servers|. More than the cardinality the client and server nodes are different in kind.
I consider a decentralised architecture to be one where the nodes can in principle participate equally.
You are arguing that the web is decentralised because there are many services to choose from. I don't disagree, but that's above the application layer protocol- which is what I thought we were discussing. In that case decentralisation happens above the application layer. So in humans? By that definition BBS's were decentralised because I could call a different one.
In other words, yes the web is decentralised because I can choose from many Forex APIs. But at the logical application layer of HTTP, OANDA is a centralised service. HTTP addresses point to specific nodes which may or may not be individual servers at the network layer, but from the point of view of HTTP that's what you address. In a decentralised application layer protocol I would expect to that not to be the case.
That Google is proposing this service is proof that individual web services are centralised. There's a single point of failure.
We're talking at different layers. It's just semantics from here on in.
I think you would have communicated your intent better if you said the web is not decentralized enough. I've been arguing the web is not centralized, you've been arguing the web is not decentralized (but by saying the web is centralized), and the problem is that both are true. The current situation is in-between those two extremes. Arguing that the web is centralized, when it isn't unless you define your scope to be so narrow as to not really encompass what most people think of when you say "web" is counter productive, when your point is a good one, and whether the web is "centralized" is irrelevant. What matters is whether there are benefits to being less/more centralized (or more/less decentralized) from the current state.
Edit: As a suggestion for how to refine your original statements so they are more accessible and understandable to those reading them, I suggest changing "the web is centralized" to "the protocols the web relies on require single centralized authority". It's more verbose, but it doesn't require cognitive leaps in just one of multiple possible directions to get what you are trying to express.