> The confusion here is most people confuse the web for the internet. The internet is a big decentralized network thanks to BGP. The web is an application riding that network thanks to HTTP.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but aren’t you making exactly that error above? DNS both predates and exposes networking infrastructure that isn’t the web.
And for what it’s worth, I would consider DNS decentralized: it’s a system of different servers that coordinate to share information. No one party owns the DNS network.
Confusing the fact that DNS’s information is authoritative for centralization would presumably ensnare every blockchain as well, since they entire point of a distributed ledger is to be authoritative.
But I figure that’s the least of blockchain’s problems, given that the underlying network topology of even the largest distributed ledgers tends to be around a dozen “big fish.” Not very decentralized in practice.
No, they don’t. The root server owners (who are mostly universities and research groups, last time I checked) have no formal ownership over the DNS network. They cannot seize or stop any participant in the network, including your scummy local ISP.
Confusing the TLD situation for ownership is making the same “distributed, authoritative” mistake.
Despite what blockchains have been showing, decentralisation doesn't have to be painfully disruptive, behave erratically, look like a complete failure or be a thinly veiled centralised system in order to be considered successful. It can also work well and smoothly!
Yep, this is the irony: the Internet (and WWW) are still mostly decentralized and distributed in the classical fault-tolerance senses of the words. They're held together with patch cables, anxiety and pager calls, and they still work better than anything the cryptocurrency space has managed to produce in the last decade.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but aren’t you making exactly that error above? DNS both predates and exposes networking infrastructure that isn’t the web.
And for what it’s worth, I would consider DNS decentralized: it’s a system of different servers that coordinate to share information. No one party owns the DNS network.
Confusing the fact that DNS’s information is authoritative for centralization would presumably ensnare every blockchain as well, since they entire point of a distributed ledger is to be authoritative.
But I figure that’s the least of blockchain’s problems, given that the underlying network topology of even the largest distributed ledgers tends to be around a dozen “big fish.” Not very decentralized in practice.