
The importance of decentralisation - telmich
https://ungleich.ch/u/blog/the-importance-of-decentralisation/
======
jasode
It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization
vs centralization.

This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles
do: _talk about the ideals and benefits_.

However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the
_economic forces_ that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists'
vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche groups but I don't
see it becoming mainstream.

To purposely be provocative to spur discussion, I will make a bold claim:
_Decentralization is an unstable equilibrium. It 's the centralization that
becomes the stable status quo._

If tpcip protocol and http protocol are _already decentralized_ , why do we
have centralized services that have "too much power" such as
Facebook/Google/Youtube? It's because different actors can _spend more money_
on their particular http node than other http nodes. Those _unequal economic
forces_ is what makes decentralization tend towards centralization. There is
no technical protocol specification that can prevent that.

E.g. if Git protocol is decentralized, why is there so much concentration on
Github? It's because John doesn't want to install a git server on his laptop
and punch a DMZ hole through his home router and leave his laptop up & running
24 hours a day to serve up his git repo. He'd rather spend the weekend playing
with his children. And Jane doesn't want to spend $30 on a Raspberry Pi and
install Gitlab on it to serve up her git repo. Multiply John and Jane's by a
million other devs with their own various reasons for not serving up their git
repos in a decentralized manner and the emergent phenomenon you get is
something like Github.

See the trend? Centralization is a _natural outcome_ of millions of people not
wanting to (1) spend money and (2) not wanting to spend extra time -- to
fulfill ideals of decentralization.

I wish we would discuss the above factors much more often and there were more
articles about it.

~~~
dmwallin
Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If
centralization was the stable form you would expect to see an overwhelming
preponderance of it. Instead you will almost always see a blend of centralized
and decentralized forms, with a bias towards decentralization wherever it's a
good fit. The vascular system is centralized; the nervous system is mostly
federated; most of the rest is highly decentralized. A counter argument is
that intelligent design changes the relative value of these different forms
but I'm not sure whether there's enough evidence to support this.

My theory on the matter is that the trend towards centralized forms in our
current society has a lot to do with Conway's Law (organizations which design
systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the
communication structures of these organizations.)

We live in a society that currently has a very hierarchal, centralized and
structured systems of power. This means that the subsystems (eg Corporations)
and the artifacts of those systems are subtly pushed towards a similar form.

~~~
aalleavitch
I would argue that there's an incredibly powerful force that drives the
consolidation and centralization of systems in modern society: the wholly
artificial legal concept of property. We are given a legal right to accumulate
control over as large a swathe of material goods and organizational structures
as we can within the confines of the law, and this ownership is backed by the
promise of state violence should it be violated.

The concept of property, and the fact that our laws and government are built
around protecting it, is the sole mechanism through which massive disparities
in power are achieved and maintained in society. It centralizes wealth through
avarice, making our stomachs unlimited in size. It also creates the dilemma of
externalities, as we differentiate the value to us of the things we "own"
versus the things we hold in common with others or that are "owned" by the
state.

Property is also a entirely artificial concept. It takes the practical concept
of use and possession and extends upon it to completely absurd extremes. It
ties our society up in knots wasting a massive amount of human energy in the
activity of determining and enforcing property ownership, and leads to
incredibly convoluted structures in laws and markets, often leading to huge
structural failures.

For instance, intellectual property law is completely absurd, on every level.
It is an effort to force something that is fundamentally free and infinitely
available to everyone to become scarce exclusively so that we can properly
ensure it fits into a property-based system. The amount we lose as a society
from the fact that all software is not simply open source is incalculable.

~~~
javajosh
_> wholly artificial legal concept of property_

Property is an informational concept more than a legal one. The concept of
"mine" is present at a very young age, and clearly present in various animal
groups. The data-structure is a simple association of objects with an owner,
and for the substrate animals use only their brains, but humans use paper and,
increasingly, bits. Banks and local government agencies keep the most official
of these records, but informal records count too. (My son may think my
daughter's blanket is his, but she will protest loudly and vehemently, and
there is not really a formal reason for her claim).

 _concept of property...is the sole mechanism through which massive
disparities in power are achieved and maintained_

Property is a necessary, but insufficient condition for inequality. Property
is how you keep score; the reason some players win far more than others is not
entirely known, but I'm pretty sure it has more to do with personality,
talent, and luck than the jurisprudence of property rights.

It's not clear what a society without property would be like, BTW.

~~~
int_19h
The "natural" concept of property is much more narrow than our abstract
notions. Animals, and human societies before they develop the abstract
property theory, generally define property through possession or use - your
house is yours because you live in it, that sort of thing. You can't establish
an association simply by saying, "this is mine". This puts a natural limit on
how much property can be accumulated.

Once you have abstract property as a concept, it's all about tracking the
association in and of itself, separated from any physical manifestations of it
(possession and use). Your house is yours not because you live in it, but
because there's a title on it in your name, and a record in the registry. This
makes it possible for one person to have ten houses, live in one, and rent the
rest out to those who don't have any. If they accumulate the rent, they can
eventually buy more houses, and it becomes a positive feedback loop.

But there's no particular reason why any given society has to adopt such a
system of property, and not all societies did or do today - especially with
respect to land and other immovables. This can often be seen in the colonial
history, where the colonizers expected to be able to buy and sell things that
the indigenous population didn't even consider property, or at least the kind
of property that could be bought and sold. More often than not, the colonizing
power would then declare that in the absence of a "proper" abstract property
claim on e.g. the land, it's there for the taking of anybody who is willing to
make one. And that is how we ended up in the present situation, where that
system of abstract property rights is mostly enforced throughout the globe -
but I don't see how it follows that it's a system that is inevitable for any
human society.

~~~
barberousse
"But do you have a flag?"

------
mapgrep
The article calls ipv6 an “easy way” to decentralize but I don’t see it.

If you click the link on how to get your own ipv6 space you get two options:
Ask your ISP for an address or set up a tunnel to someone else who will give
you one.

These are the same options we have today for ipv4. I went on my crappy large
ISP’s website. They are not handing out static ipv6.

Why would they? The problem has always been more about corporate power than
tech.

~~~
thu2111
That'll change with time. I'm behind ISP NAT for IPv4 but have static IPv6
direct to all my devices in the home. My ISP ran out of IPv4 relatively early
so had to go this way.

On the other hand, this won't really change much for the firewall issues named
above. Computers are too insecure to expose them all to the internet, all the
time. We'd need pretty radical changes in how software is written to create a
truly flat worldwide network (which has never existed before).

------
oakejp12
I may be somewhat confused, but how would a different IP address/system
prevent centralized services? It seems to me that the same market problems,
the strong vendor lock-ins explained in the post, will still persist in IPv6.
There's no mention of how/why IPv6 solves those problems, just that they do...

~~~
telmich
It doesn't prevent them, but with IPv6 everyone can take back control. With
IPv4, you are unable to get a decent amount of public addresses to run your
service (if you are not having tons of money already).

~~~
zzzcpan
You are talking about lower layer protocols here that don't matter for
decentralization. In fact, a decentralized transport protocol can be made that
doesn't require your ISP to give you an internet routable IP address nor put
you behind NAT.

Think e-mail, for example. It never required you to have an internet routable
IP addresses to communicate with anyone. There were and are plenty of local
networks where people run local SMTP servers that communicate with upstream
SMTP servers over local network and only those have public IP addresses to
communicate with SMTP servers over public internet.

------
nicey
[https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-
selfhosted/](https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted/)

~~~
nebulon
If you want to selfhost many of those apps, we have built a tool (Cloudron) to
take away most of the deployment hassle for many of those apps mentioned in
the link. Also to work around the provider lock-in with ipv4 addresses while
hosting from your home or on-premise we have a built-in dynamic DNS feature
[https://cloudron.io/documentation/networking/#dynamic-
dns](https://cloudron.io/documentation/networking/#dynamic-dns) So in the end
it doesn't matter if you change ISP or if you don't even have a static ipv4 as
such.

~~~
olah_1
Cloudron is missing apps for most use cases I actually care about.

Can you add a google photos type app? Maybe Piwigo (it has a good mobile app)
or OwnPhotos[1] (it has face/object recognition). Lychee doesn't have a mobile
app or face/object recognition.

Can you add some communication apps like Matrix Synapse or Ejabberd?
Mattermost is walled off from the outside world.

Can you add some social apps like Pleroma or Mastodon?

[1]:
[https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos](https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos)

~~~
shuriky
Well, Cloudron provides apps for most use cases _most_ people need. So the
fact that you need some obscure apps doesn't invalidate Cloudron as a great
solution. I've been using it for a long time and love what it has to offer.
Plus the devs are great and keep working on making it better.

------
clarkmoody
Local-first software development[1][2] could also be a force for
decentralization, since you don't need a coordination server to hold the
authoritative version of a document. The relevant protocol for discussion is
the CRDT (conflict-free, replicated data type).

[1] [https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-
first.html](https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804478)
(6 months ago)

------
foobar_
Some random thoughts on centralization vs decentralization. In theory, IPv6
allows every human, pet, alien and robot to have an address. Each address can
host let's say the following services

1\. info - dns

2\. data transfer - ftp/http/p2p/...

3\. communication - email/voip/...

4\. entertainment - game server/media server/...

Right now the biggest problems with decentralisation are

1\. ownership of hardware

2\. assigning of address and interfacing with the network.

3\. configuration and setup of services

4\. scalability of the service

5\. using decentralized stuff for illegal activities

I think 2 and 3 is the biggest win improving decentralized services and
getting rid of facebook and the like. Why are two and 3 still hard? This will
also make decentralized services appealing to normal folks. The biggest
challenge to making decentralized services mainstream is 5.

Hardware is manufactured by a few monopolies and they impose some restrictions
and tracking abilities. The assigning of an address is done by the telecom and
they have some rules, regulations and tracking abilities. Each country right
now is setting up new rules and regulations for the data that comes into it.
As configuring and the setting up of stuff is hard we once again have a few
major services. The illegal activity makes decentralized services seem like
the wild west and centralized services seem like stable societies. The spirit
of legality is to ensure fairness but when that doesn't happen people turn to
decentralized mediums to express themselves.

------
djsumdog
I wrote an article about just the e-commerce aspect of this a few weeks back:

[https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-death-of-the-mom-and-
pop-...](https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-death-of-the-mom-and-pop-e-store/)

There are fewer and fewer websites with things for sale. Everyone puts their
stuff on an Amazon, eBay, Newegg, Etsy or Reverb store. The big carriers are
the store-of-stores.

Some people setup a Shopify or other site as well, but it's usually secondary,
or it's to sell merch for another thing like webcomic or blog.

------
neilobremski
As someone who works in the domain name industry, I'd like to note that there
is ever increasing pressure to police domain name use. When you buy and use a
generic TLD such as "com" or "ninja", you are buying a US product and it is
subject to sanction laws and other things you may not realize. CC TLDs (two
characters long like "ch") are products of that country and have their own
laws UNLESS the registry company is located in the US - in which case it is
also subject to sanctions.

I point this out because unless you get everyone using your IPv6 address
directly, your name is certainly NOT decentralized.

~~~
austhrow743
Any thoughts on which TLDs are least susceptible to shenanigans?

~~~
number6
Decentralized ones like provided by OpenNic

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNIC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNIC)

------
Merrill
Is there an effective way to suppress denial of service attacks in a
decentralized network?

Given that there are DNS root servers, isn't the internet actually
centralized?

~~~
organsnyder
You have to centralize somewhere—IP address assignments are also centralized.

~~~
blotter_paper
Not really -- look at CJDNS, Tor, or IPFS for examples of totally
decentralised addressing schemes. These can be mapped to human readable
addresses through Namecoin or Ethereum Name Service. We do centralize
somewhere, but we don't _have_ to.

------
miguelmota
So long as ISPs are centralized, it doesn’t matter if everyone has their own
IPv6 address because ISPs are gatekeepers that can censor requests.

------
marknadal
The Internet Archive (parent of the Wayback Machine, Top 300 website in the
world) is doing a lot to help re-decentralize the web.

Check out this post for more info:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685682)

------
hirundo
This underlines the positive side of Tall Poppy Syndrome. Envy has a number of
serious down sides, including making the sufferer miserable for, usually, very
little return. But when people stop using an Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.,
_because_ they are successful, it creates a counter-force to centralization.
Like hate, when well directed, envy can be good. Like hate, it can easily get
out of control and cause great damage, up to and including genocides.

~~~
dgb23
Envy might be a factor but I feel like wanting freedom and mistrusting
authorities/corporations are stronger here.

------
amilein7minutes
Sorry for the naive question but can anyone explain why hosting an IPv6-only
server can help with decentralization? As a provider of some service, say you
have a website where you publish some work, is there any advantage of setting
it up as an IPv6 server?

~~~
buzzkillington
Yes and no.

You can build centralization on every layer of the network stack. Facebook is
centralization on the application layer. The problem is that with IP addresses
being as rare as they are in the ipv4 space you have a lot of tricks that you
need to use and ultimately you go through someone using a real ipv4 address.

Ipv6 doesn't have that, so it lets you decentralize further down the stack.
While this is good in its own right, currently we don't have issues with ip
address monopolies, unlike application layer monopolies.

And that's the problem we have. Doesn't matter how many open layers you have,
someone can always build a closed system on top of them.

------
hkjhreiou
So what's the latest deal with IPv6?

IPv4 was supposed to run out and the Internet come crashing down 5 years ago,
yet here we are, and everything seems just fine, while a billion smartphones
were added.

~~~
tambre
> while a billion smartphones were added

A huge number of them being on IPv6-only mobile networks using NAT64 to access
the old Internet.

------
explodingcamera
Missed a really cool vanity url opportunity :)

------
peterwwillis
The internet will not stop being decentralized just because there are some
consumer product monopolies.

When Amazon starts running its own dark fiber, and you can only use that fiber
to buy shoes that are only sold on Amazon, then _part_ of the internet will be
close to being centralized. But that would still just be a small part of it,
and it still won't happen entirely.

There's a very long tail between Amazon and the user. How does Amazon connect
to the user? Sure, it starts in their datacenter. But then immediately they
need to connect to multiple points of presence, which means multiple bundles
of fiber going in different directions. And so you'd say, sure, Amazon has
lots of DCs, so they could just run dark fiber between all of them. But
they're not _everywhere_, so they need to eventually peer to a more global
network.

Eventually you get to the ISP. There's two kinds of ISPs: wired and wireless.
While they're increasingly the same company, there is a wealth of technology,
expense, competition, and physical infrastructure wrapped up in each. Copper
and fiber runs to every home, customer support, billing, management, contracts
with public and private entities. There's multiple companies in these
industries that are bigger than Amazon.

Say Amazon becomes its own ISP. They can either run fiber to every home (lol)
or become their own nationwide wireless ILEC (lol) or they can become an MVNO
and rent access to an ISP's gear (possible) or they can just pay internet
backbones to peer with them and get access to all ISPs' customers. The first
two would basically be like making a brand new Comcast; uh, good luck with
that. The third is what Comcast already does: they rent ILEC's networks to
provide their own mobile service, capturing more customers. The last is how
the internet operates today: the ISP deals with the complexity of getting
everyone in the country online, and Amazon just pays to connect to POPs.

In a non-net-neutrality world, any ISP can add a line-item to your bill for
you to get access to Amazon. In that case, Amazon becoming an ISP avoids that,
capturing more profit in the process. But why in "Bob"'s name go through all
that work, when you can just charge people individually to access your
website? Aka, Amazon Prime. So in order to completely control your access to
shoes, they can either build an ISP, or just..... use existing ISPs.
Currently, most ISPs aren't adding line-items to access Amazon, so the latter
works fine.

In another bizzaro possibility, Amazon could merge with every ISP in America,
creating a hyperconglomerate, so only Americans could access Amazon, and every
ISP bill is charged for Prime, and every non-American ISP has to pay to route
traffic to Amazon. I think that would just crush Amazon's sales, but it's
possible. But _still_ the internet would be decentralized, at least globally.

And one final option that actually already exists in developing nations:
Amazon and a handful of other monopolies subsidize ISPs to create a "bare-
bones" internet plan, where you literally can only surf to Facebook, Amazon,
and Google, but you only pay $10 a month. _This_ would be a consumer-only
internet that is totally centralized and monopolized - but it's still not the
whole internet.

Then of course there's _every other business in the world_ that is not
consumer-oriented, all of whom depend on the internet for their business. They
also have an interest in a decentralized internet, because it helps them
compete with each other, too. They'd be happy to fund a decentralized
internet, if only for themselves.

This is all besides the fact that decentralization is actually an
architectural decision _made by a central organization - the DoD_. They made
it decentralized because it just works better, not because they wanted the
whole world to hold hands and sing kumbaya. Even in this fantasy world of a
centralized internet, with one company managing all the consumer services, b2b
services, and internet connections, they'd _still_ keep a decentralized
architecture, because they know it's really friggin' robust. The network
architecture has nothing to do with who has control.

If your concern is monopolies, an internet protocol does not change this at
all. If your concern is being able to host your own services, that's still at
the discretion of your ISP.

------
zemo
this article doesn't deal at all with DNS so kinda misses like the biggest
centralization flaw on the internet but whatever

