Internet Centralization: How We Got from There to Here -- Identifying the Root Cause
My one-pager to IRTF DINRG Workshop on Internet Centralization https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/interim-2021-dinrg-01/materials/slides-interim-2021-dinrg-01-sessa-searching-for-the-root-cause-lixia-zhang-00 Lixia Zhang (lixia@cs.ucla.edu), May 16 2021 Recent years have witnessed a growing number of efforts and activities in developing solutions to “decentralize the Internet” – clearly the Internet today is no longer what it is used to be. However, in order to find effective means to move forward, the first step is to understand how we got here. Unprecedented Internet growth took most, if not all, people by surprise and unprepared . Only in retrospect, one gets to see a bit clearly what has happened. It seems to me that today’s control power centralization resulted from an imbalance among the three factors: economy, network architecture, and regulation. If we look at the architecture first: the original Internet was distributed because anyone could communicate with anyone else w