Competitively Decentralized Internet

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1osU8vnuOW1eV3hdYMxg8hDh7E6kZLvf05uKvgYAE6SU/edit?pli=1#

by elisk • 14 years ago

2 1 14 years ago

docs.google.com

bstpierre• 14 years ago

It seems ironic that a document that wants to avoid a "small group to have oligopolistic control" is hosted on Google.

The primary problem with a "completely decentralized internet" seems to be glossed over in the document. They focus on routing as a central challenge, but it seems to me that transmission is the elephant in the room. If you're going to replace the existing internet with something that gets rid of the oligopoly, you can't ignore the fact that inter- and trans-continental transmission requires expensive infrastructure. The amount of capital required necessarily limits the number of market participants.

Sure, you could theoretically communicate across a continent via cooperative mesh, but the number of hops required to get from, say Virginia to California, on a cooperative mesh network would be prohibitive. I don't know how you'd pass packets from Boston to London without some heavyweight capital investment that seems to imply a very small number of players in the market.

Competitively Decentralized Internet

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