[jokoon]

The nature of http and websites makes the web centralized: there's always a server, users don't really serve data, it's always stored somewhere.

It's true that it's decentralized, that's it's easy to create websites, but in nature, if you shut down dns servers, you shut down 99% of the internet, which inclues HTML website.

And I think that a decentralized web might be more easy to index (proof of work system, etc).

[kbenson]

That's not centralized, it's just less decentralized. Centralized and decentralized or on opposite ends of the spectrum. It's possible to be less decentralized and still be very far from centralized. There are many, many different entities providing all sorts of services, so I'm not sure how that portion can be seen as centralized at all. DNS, as you not, is probably the most centralized single point that everything relies on, but they simply have authority because we give them authority. If DNS server adminitrators decided to use different root servers, there's not a lot they can do about that. But I'll concede that authoritative DNS is fairly centralized, given it requires checking with a single authority, but even then, man entities(TLDs) have a say in what that authority says (but not the ultimate say).

[jokoon]

Well you're right, in nature and architecture the internet in decentralized, but the use most users make of it, is centralized.

If you look at what internet.org attempted to do, that's actually how the internet is used most of the time. For consumers and most small businesses, internet is centralized. Technically, most of the internet is just http requests, meaning that there will always be this duality of servers and clients. Without web servers and their admins, there is nothing, and that's a form of control in my opinion: you can easily shut down a website.

[kbenson]

I still don't see that. A centralized internet, or event a centralized "web" as has been distinctly defined elsewhere here, implies a single authority. That doesn't exist, and I don't see it existing in the future. Which email provider do you want to use? Pick from hundreds. Which social network do you want to use? Pick from from the tens of candidates. Which blog platform do you want to use, pick from hundreds again.

> Without web servers and their admins, there is nothing, and that's a form of control in my opinion: you can easily shut down a website.

There are webservers, and admins. That hasn't changed. There's been a shift to larger sites, but there's still plenty of small ones. You sill have the options to put your site at many different locations, or use a platform such as Facebook, Blogger or Wordpress.

[jokoon]

Look, here google is trying to solve the problem of government surveillance and security. Web servers are a very weak point because you can shut them down if you have the law on your side, and recently the law has been abusive. And even if you can change your DNS, the root servers are still an important part of the internet, and they're subject to control and legal issues. Control and authority makes those aspects of the internet centralized. This applies to your hundreds of mail and web providers, which are not free by the way (datacenters). Decentralized technologies are entirely free.

What I'm talking about, is protocols that make services impossible to shut down, like bittorrent or bitcoin. That's what I mean by a decentralized internet. Those technologies are different and were made especially with the goal of avoiding control, and they are exactly the solutions to breaches of privacy. Here every computer is equal, and that's a true decentralized internet, in term of hardware AND software. What I was talking about, is generalizing bitcoin and bittorrent to messaging or even hosting databases.

Such software would run on many domestic computers that want to use it and host chunks of data in a redundant manner. The issue is authenticity and signing of data. But other than that, that's where the future is.

I'm sorry but I can't trust the html/http web one bit. HTML and javascript are awful technologies, which are slow to parse, building web browsers have been a race that resulted in no interesting progress and the web2.0 has been a joke. All those techs have been the base google have been making its money on, which also makes easy to mine, so to me centralization is a privacy issue.