[lrem]

So, you're essentially advocating rewinding the Internet to pre-Facebook time and continuing from there? I'm all for that. Damn, every time I stumble upon the Google Talk page, with its explanation how participating in an open decentralised world is good for everyone involved, I feel tremendously sad for how things worked out.

Unfortunately, the world decided to go the centralised way. At some point I had to re-work my outstanding papers, because any mention of peer-to-peer or even decentralisation meant immediate rejection. Internet service providers went more greedy, so if you don't build your own global backbone to have some leverage, you need to pay someone who does or you're hosed. Even the laws in place start to strongly reflect an expectation of overpowered centralised platform beneath any communication.

Then, finally, what we ultimately need is to figure out the money flow. People want polished products and that costs money. The centralised platforms we have today have succeeded because they figured some funding. Achieving that in a decentralised world is the main problem we should be looking at. I'm afraid "just slap blockchain on it" is a highly detrimental approach, but I haven't seen anything more serious (not that I looked seriously).

Dislaimer: I'm in Google now, but this comment actually reflects my personal post-INRIA sentiments.