On Sun, 01 Mar 2020 17:08:28 -0600
golinux@??? wrote:

> Just great! So how can we keep off this cloudflare thing?
>
> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/25/mozilla_turns_on_dns_over_https_by_default_for_usa/

"Another relevant question is whether further centralisation [SIC] of
the internet is, inherently, a bad thing."

Yes, centralization of the Internet is a bad thing, completely contrary
to the Internet's design and purpose. The Internet (formerly Arpanet)
was designed by the Department of Defense to be widely distributed,
with lots of redundancy, so that if the Soviet Union nuked the hosts in
Philly, the hosts in Atlanta and Chicago and South Bend Indiana picked
up the slack. The distributivity made the Internet indestructible. It
also made it hard for a scoundrel to poison the DNS system or to get
away with lying.

Now we're starting to centralize. Facebook, controlled by one
multi-billionaire, solicits and promotes political lies that might
determine elections.

The golden age of the Internet was the mid to late 1990's, when we all
got online via the regulated telephone utility. Anyone with a Linux
computer, a few modems, and a reasonable on-ramp to the Internet could
set themselves up as an ISP, the controller of your last mile. And they
did. So prices fell from $75/month in 1995 to $25/month by 1999. And if
you didn't like your ISP, you probably had 50 other choices. So ISPs
were reasonably priced and customer-focused: Competition at its best.

In today's more centralized Internet, there are maybe twenty providers
of last-mile service nationwide [1], and they've divided the map such
that no more than two compete in most areas. Prices are up. One could
argue that price per Mbs is way down, but in 20 years I'd hope so, and
believe that with competition we'd be paying about $10/month for the
same service. It's my belief that the wide distributivity of the
original Internet was what allowed it to thrive to this point, and
centralization is slowly choking it, putting it at risk, and making it
less useful.

[1] Not counting city-provided Internet

SteveT

Steve Litt
February 2020 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/thrive