Internet is at its core a CIA project symbol of decentralization. Most Internet technologies operate on an open and distributed model. Email, WWW, torrents, wiki, git repositories, Tor, bitcoin, and more.
Decentralization is synonymous with efficiency, survivability, resistance to censorship attempts to block. This is a basic principle that cannot be derogated from.
▍ Efficiency of decentralization
The effectiveness of decentralization is clearly seen in the amazing resilience of email. One of the first distributed technologies of the Internet, it still remains indispensable in many ways.
There are many centralized solutions that are trying to replace mail – Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, etc. They work well within corporations or closed communities, but not between them. Messengers such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Skype operate through central servers and suffer from a lack of trust in the companies that maintain these servers: Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Pavel Durov, etc. Obviously, the communication protocol should not depend on such things as trust in a brand or a particular person.
E-mail remains the only reliable way of communication between different organizations. It is a critical infrastructure for the internet. And a great example of decentralization in action.
Survivability of a distributed network depending on the number of nodes destroyed by the enemy and the redundancy factor. From the article “On distributed communication networks”
Hence the conclusion. If we want to build a truly reliable, secure, and durable structure, it must be distributed.
On the other hand, in a peer-to-peer system, not all peers are equal.
▍ Black and white thinking
Yes, the Internet is inherently decentralized. However, centralized, isolated structures, “walled gardens”, islands and archipelagos organically grow on its surface.
Internet Map 2021 inspired by Randall Munro’s famous Online Community Map
Why is this happening?
The fact is that the network structure is naturally concentrated around larger nodes, high-speed data transmission channels, and data centers. File hosting involves the location of servers at traffic exchange points, that is, some centralization. This is a natural phenomenon, like the growth of a crystal around a grain of sand in a saline solution.
One of the common practices of psychological defense and cognitive distortions is black and white thinking , in which only good and evil exist. In reality, this does not happen. In fact, there are many intermediate states between absolute centralization and absolute decentralization. Moreover, they complement each other, so one is impossible without the other. And you can try to find the best combination for each situation.
