[chuhnk]

It's cyclical and this should be obvious to anyone in technology. We move between eras of centralisation and decentralisation. The internet started as a decentralised network in which we then built high capacity centralised systems at an accelerated rate. We're now about to shift back into a new era of decentralisation fuelled by edge/fog computing, IoT and p2p networks all on top of the existing infrastructure.

The point is that it only occurs when we have a specific need and a niche vertical to initially leverage it in. In one form it's bitcoin for payments. In another form its IoT and essentially sensor networks. You can imagine autonomous vehicles being a huge p2p network for speed as opposed to feeding all the data back to the cloud.

[qwtel]

Or consider the much more "cynical" (and in my mind more obvious, if it wasn't for our habit of seeing patterns everywhere) view that there might not be any structure, cyclical or other, to the course of history. In that view, whether the future of the internet will be centralized or decentralized is undetermined and will most likely be a mishmash of both, the extent of with will depend on inertia, ideology, economics and luck.

[jeffreyrogers]

I think the tendency will be towards centralization because centralization is more efficient.

[substack]

Not for transferring large files. A centralized architecture is the most expensive, slow way to do that.

[amelius]

Could be. But how can you assume the trend is cyclical if we've seen only one and a half cycles?

[digi_owl]

Pretty much. The way i see it is that as there is an upsurge of easy money and/or cheap resources, you get a bunch of talk about decentralization, standards and cooperation. But once the cycle start turning round, everyone goes back to building silos via lock-in and proprietary solutions.

At this point the net may well be seeing its third such cycle.