[betterunix2]

Uh...

1970: Early networks suffered from congestive collapse problems, routing protocols were slow to converge, computed suboptimal routes, and had count-to-infinity problems, only a handful of transit networks existed, domain names were managed by one dude broadcasting a file to everyone, little to no security infrastructure, etc.

2021: We have robust congestion control and queue management, scalable routing protocols that find optimal routes and have no count-to-infinity problems, DNS, large numbers of transit networks with a high level of redundancy, and at least some security infrastructure in key places (DNSSEC, RPKI, etc.).

Don't confuse web infrastructure and hosting services with the Internet itself, which is the network and which has never been more distributed or more robust than it is today.

[cj]

I see your point, but do all those network level improvements mean much to the end user when so many critical services live in datacenters owned by 1 company? Many of which in a single region on the east coast, that goes dark at least a couple times a year for hours on end?

[betterunix2]

Some perspective: in 1986 the Internet experienced a congestive collapse that reduced the useful throughput by 3 orders of magnitude. End users noticed, and if it happened today there would be pandemonium.

The Internet has become so robust and reliable that end users take the network for granted. At this point most of the headline-making incidents involve services running on the Internet, not the Internet itself (at least in the US, EU, and other highly-connected regions/countries; there are still countries that can be taken offline by just one cable being severed, and their Internet users cannot take the network for granted yet). In my adult life there have only been a handful of significant, global outages/reductions in service quality on the Internet itself. Regional outages happen from time to time, though few are significant enough to make national or international news.

So yes, network-level improvements mean a lot to end users -- they mean that end users can rely on the network itself, and only have to worry about problems at higher levels of the stack.

[catlikesshrimp]

I love the internet as it is today (facebook and google aside) the system is reliable enough for us. But the discussion is about centralization. This is not about infrastructure.

The day facebook was down for a few hours, I was asked why the internet was down. That person uses the internet for fb and whatsapp (also fb) A decentralized communication protocol and a federated social network wouldn't fail completely under the same circumstances.

[Gigachad]

I think that's more a statement about how reliable the current system is where users think their network is down rather than facebook which would be unthinkable.

[meltedcapacitor]

Facebook could also run federated technically, so that it never fails all at once. It failed because they put all the eggs in one basket in some top layer.

Technical decentralization is orthogonal to commercial issues.

[immibis]

If it was federated it wouldn't be Facebook, it would be Mastodon.

If it was federated and Facebook still controlled it, it would still be centralized.

[edoceo]

Is it really that frequent? Or does it just feel huge cause it owns so much?

[walrus01]

It wasn't supposed to be serious, but for anyone that's ever seen a catastrophic level3 failure as a peer or large customer of AS3356... It's less resilient than you think. There are way too many eggs in one basket in some places.

[betterunix2]

Global outages or reductions in service quality are very rare these days. Regional outages happen from time to time but are not very common. Local outages are frequent, but irrelevant -- the Internet is meant to be resilient to local outages, which presupposes that local outages are a common concern. Obviously if you shrink your scope enough you will be able to say problems happen regularly -- considering only the connectivity in my home there are many incidents each year.

The most significant incident in recent memory involved a severed fiber optic line in New York City earlier this year, which affected the US Northeast in various ways. The impact was relatively short-lived, and despite living and working in NYC I was not personally affected at all -- even though I use Verizon FIOS and the line in question was operated by Verizon (a testament to how resilient Verizon's own network is). That is the mark of an extremely robust system -- a major, overly-centralized component (one cable carrying many supposedly redundant links) is destroyed and the effects remain highly localized and the impact is not universal even within the local area.