[jotm]

How long until it reverts back to some nodes having way more influence/power/data than the others?

This is not only a technology problem, it's (mostly, I'd say) a social one. Humans will always want more power and control, whether it's in real life or online.

Every single type of governance has fallen victim to human greed and ambition, as will any kind of Internet, I believe.

Fix the users - save the Internet! :)

[elvinyung]

I think a lot about this.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari talk about the opposition between the state apparatus and the "war machine" (their term for a nomadic/decentralized structure). They talk about how it seems like nomadic societies are primitive, but actually a lot of nomadic societies have "collective mechanisms of inhibition" to ward off the formation of a state apparatus, by preventing power from accumulating within any one party and "evening it out" among everyone.

The applicability of D&G's ideas on the war machine to our current problem of platform power is immediately apparent. A centralized platform is exactly like a state apparatus. In our situation the collective mechanisms of inhibition might be something like stronger/more proactive antitrust laws to break up/nationalize entities that become infrastructural components of the society.

But as you've mentioned, I think this problem of "uneven development" is a feature of any marketplace-like structure. In sufficiently large numbers, a power law tends to assert itself with no other checks on power. This is why blockchains by themselves won't solve the problem. The debate, then, shifts to be about whether this is a feature or a bug, which is something that I'm never sure about.

To close, another quote from ATP comes to mind ("smooth space" is another term they use for nomadic spaces):

> Smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.

[hestefisk]

Awesome to see others on HN loving D&G. But perhaps also power is cyclical. When the web was first popularised, it had the same potential as what DWeb has now. TCP/IP was written to be inherently distributed and provide resilient routing. Then, as soon as it starts to threaten existing power structures, forces kick in to try and stabilise it through control, surveillance, and ‘governance’. It becomes part of the rhizome, the rhizomatic system of power, that the new system (in this case TCP/IP / www) set out to challenge, creating an even more complex, ever-evolving rhizome of power (surveillance, paywalls, censorship). The same thing happened with other revolutions throughout history — the power base they set out to challenge, transmorphed into a similar power structure as an unintended consequence.

[elvinyung]

Well, I think this cyclical pattern shows exactly exactly why the thinking around the war machine is so important. Thinking about this very naively, to get closer to the kind of smooth space that D&G conceptualize, it is necessary to have some kind of homeostatic system that recognizes abstractly when power (and I'm using this term in a very naive, non-Foucauldian way) is being disproportionately concentrated in any one body, and corrects accordingly.

That said, as from my previous comment, I'm not totally confident that this kind of decentralization is even optimal, but that's a story for another time.

[lgierth]

> forces kick in to try and stabilise it through control, surveillance, and ‘governance’

Which is ARIN/RIPE/APNIC/AFRINIC/LACNIC and the DNS root zones, and ICANN on top.

Not to say that's only bad, just trying to illustrate that in this case, D&G's point is actually pretty tangible.

[albertgoeswoof]

It will always be a struggle, just like the offline world. It doesn’t mean you give up, we haven’t defected to a new world order offline so why do it online?

[peterwwillis]

It's not really technological or social, it's logistical.

We've had all kinds of redundant network topologies that used independent networks for decades. The internet is decentralized, and it works pretty well, all things considered. The web is fairly decentralized, too: DNS is independent of a registrar is independent of a network service provider and all are independent of ISP's, and even those are independent of backbones.

The only thing that isn't very decentralized is the client-server IP/TCP/HTTP model. You can provide decentralized versions of HTTP services, but those are the things that are the most costly and inconvenient to decentralize. It can be done, but it's a huge pain with very little benefit.

[hestefisk]

HTTP is client / server (session) based, but TCP / IP certainly isn’t. I’m is act as a client / server protocol because we tell it to, but IP networking was written to be distributed / decentralised so as to provide better resilience, unlike other networking standards at that time (token ring, anyone?).

[peterwwillis]

TCP is connection-oriented, and each connection is a session. IP is decentralized, but the way it's used now in consumer devices makes initiating connections to them difficult and dangerous. Any realistic hope of a successful new distributed web should address this problem, though probably the current solution is "have clients join a private network and route back through it", completely side-stepping firewall concerns. If you ignore the concerns, I guess these protocols aren't that big a stumbling block.

[zoomablemind]

The very notion of the present Internet is grounded on the network infrastructure that is formed through ISPs. Everyone needs a gateway and a 'bus' to reach the desired end-point. Most ISPs still limit the upstream bandwidth for consumers and charge a premium making it a friction point. In a way the centralization is just a logical outcome of such 'rationing'.

Distributed network will even more depend on the ISPs due to self-serving nature.

Perhaps the 'decentralized' web should also address the very foundation of the network - the network infrastructure and access to it.

Does Internet need to depend on the ISPs?

[bradgessler]

It will probably look and feel a lot like how Github has effectively centralized git repos. At least in this world if we don’t like how somebody is centralizing something it can be easily and quickly moved.

[r32a_]

Imho it comes to incentives and different factions keeping each other in check, the same way it's done in Bitcoin and in some ways in Democracy. Although it's important to note that Decentralised systems are different to Distributed systems. In decentralized systems, there exist parties with more influence than others but none of those has enough influence to overpower all of the other ones.

You could see this play out every time any party has tried to take full control of Bitcoin. So far everyone has failed

[matchagaucho]

And eventually a decentralized node will become the new central node for the next big thing.

It's all cyclical.