[bullen]

They should probably add that merely adding yet another protocol centralizes things.

Implementing them takes time and you need many implementations for the protocols themselves to become de-centralized.

This is what breaks most new protocols and languages combined with diminishing returns (low hanging fruit has allready been harvested).

Personally I'm going back to HTTP, DNS and SMTP.

And even if DNS is completely centralized, it's the only thing we have for name lookups after 38 years!

Also I never rely on DNS if I can avoid it (I use static IPs and only use the hostname for virtual hosting / load balancing).

And de-centralization by hosting is more important than the protocol itself being p2p, since no p2p protocol can operate purely without server because of discovery.

I have made my own, from scratch, implementation of all 3:

DNS and SMTP soon coming to a rupy (HTTP), enabling DNS and SMTP through HTTP, you'll basically be able to control DNS and SMTP via a "Servlet/Filter".

Home hosting on fiber with static IP and ports 80, 53 and 25 open is the real challenge.

Making sure your ISP enables those has way higher priority than this document!

And the real canary is when you don't get an external IP on your fiber when IPv4 allocations in Africa run out.

It's time to wake up if we want an internet that does not become rent seeking.

Google charges for static IP addresses on GCP which should not be a thing if they get allocations for free.

IPv4 is a scarce asset, so they have an incentive to slow down IPv6!

[tecleandor]

> Google charges for static IP addresses on GCP which should not be a thing if they get allocations for free.

Same as in AWS (IIRC) in Google Cloud you don't get billed for static IP addresses if they are in use:

"If you reserve a static external IP address and do not assign it to a resource such as a VM instance or a forwarding rule, you are charged at a higher rate than for static and ephemeral external IP addresses that are in use.

You are not charged for static external IP addresses that are assigned to forwarding rules."

https://cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing

[bullen]

That's not true, I have 3 static IPs connected to VMs and they charge me for them:

External IP Charge on a Standard VM Usage 2021-11-01 2021-11-30 2,XXX.XXX hour 50.XXXXXSEK

So ~$2 per IP in USE per month!

>gcloud compute addresses list

ERROR: (gcloud.compute.addresses.list) Some requests did not succeed:

- Request had insufficient authentication scopes.

We need to move away from these companies before it's too late... they are incompetent and rent seeking.

They also do not rebate your free instance if you shut it off and change the instance type of the instance that had the rebate, even if you change it back.

And there is no recourse, no support, no way to get help.

[bullen]

I just had to authenticate apparently:

  NAME  REGION        ADDRESS          STATUS
  euro  europe-west1  X.X.X.X          IN_USE
  asia  asia-east1    X.X.X.X          IN_USE
  iowa  us-central1   X.X.X.X          IN_USE

[tecleandor]

OK, now I see. I got certified a couple years ago and seem like they introduced this pricing past year.

So "...you are not charged for static external IP addresses that are assigned to forwarding rules", yes, but a VM is not a forwarding rule :P

So you gotta pay for external IPs attached to a VM, but not to a Load Balancer. Seems like they're trying to incentivize using LBs to use less IP addresses, I guess...

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> And even if DNS is completely centralized, it's the only thing we have for name lookups after 38 years!

Depending on how you mean, it's not the only thing or its not 100% centralized; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root lists the major alternatives in that immediate space.