| ISPs and hosting providers can and do take abusive accounts offline if necessary. Routing means that endpoints can usually be identified with reasonable accuracy. In the early days, access was through a very small number (single digits, double, a few dozens, a few hundreds) of organisations, mostly US-based research universities. When I first had access to the ARPANET / Internet, if I was abusing resources, I got an email, or visit, from the campus systems admin. A substantial portion of present-day ISP and datacentre operations is geared at abuse detection and mitigation, both ingress and egress.[1] Unmanaged mesh ... seems to present a much greater problem here and the entire question is simply hand-waved away. As you're doing here. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Much of this information is informal, but as a recent high-level overview (2017) see: https://abusix.com/resources/isp/what-security-should-an-isp... |
I think you misunderstood me. Giving a handful of companies control over the credibility economy is not a solution and is in some ways worse than having no credibility economy at all. These "abuse detection" systems break down when they are perpetrating the abuse. In other words, as central authorities starts choosing who has access to what according to increasingly arbitrary, political, or cultural lines. The problem wasn't really solved because the free and open internet cannot continue to exist under those conditions.
Is it far fetched to assume that a bottom-up system can't also develop a decentralized credibility economy to complement the decentralized network? I think not, and one thing would likely follow the other in due course.