[codemac]

Sure, but what about in 1992?

How much did you need to understand about TCP/IP when you got AOL? Very little.

And what happened when you got online? You could communicate online, suddenly reaching millions and then billions of humans. So learning just a little bit about IP (let's be real, you didn't need to know shit about TCP)

Compare that to a VPN or Tor. What do you need to understand to use it, and what is the payoff for knowing it? It's nowhere near the same situation as IP and the beginning of consumer internet.

[catmanjan]

Yep all it took was some usability products and it was easier... See what I'm saying...

[Daho0n]

I don't think it is comparable. In my opinion it would be comparable to if e-mail required you to be on the same server as your friends or you couldn't e-mail them OR to have compatible servers that could communicate across different protocols, which is a run to the bottom just as in e-mail where adding new security and removing legacy is near impossible.

[zrm]

> to have compatible servers that could communicate across different protocols, which is a run to the bottom just as in e-mail where adding new security and removing legacy is near impossible.

TLS was not in the original email RFC. Such a high percentage of email servers use it now that some have started refusing to communicate with ones that don't. And long before 100.0% of email servers support TLS, you can still use it whenever it's supported by the servers of the sender and recipient.

The DNS RFCs contain a specification for zone transfers, i.e. requesting all the DNS records in the zone instead of any given one. Some people don't like the idea of anybody being able to download their entire zone, and it was always a silly way to sync zones between DNS servers as opposed to using e.g. rsync, so most DNS servers on the internet refuse to do it and a lot of DNS server software doesn't even implement it. But the people still using it internally for whatever silly reason can carry on doing so indefinitely without hurting anybody else.

Nobody cares about the legacy cruft that nobody they care about uses. What having central control gets you is the ability to decree from the tower that something some people are still using shall be removed for everyone everywhere. That can be more of a bug than a feature.

The biggest actual problem with protocol ossification is stupid network middleboxes that manipulate or drop traffic and then break on protocol changes they don't understand. The way to fix this is for future protocols to be encrypted so the middleboxes can't mess with it.

[codemac]

In this case centralization is the usability, just like AOL centralized internet access options for users? Maybe you're unfamiliar with AOL in the beginning but it was largely a walled garden that happened to have a web browser.

[catmanjan]

Centralisation didn't make it easier to use, ask yourself why AOL was in every household