On Sun, 01 Mar 2020 17:08:28 -0600 goli...@devuan.org 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 _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng