Every time I take a step back and look at what the internet is today I am simply amazed. That we could for once agree world wide on running this huge thing together involving almost every country in existence. Leaving (recent) developments like carrier grade Nat aside, we have a system that enables me to address anybody anywhere on this planet directly and send them a data packet that arrives within milliseconds.

I mean we had the same with phones or mail before but its still different because the Internet is technically decentralized. Anyone could fuck around badly with BGP, but it's mostly OK. DNS is completely optional or you could roll your own, but everyone participates.

With phones, you just need to agree on the country codes and everything that happens after that is everyone's own business. Mail even more so, you drop it off somewhere at the destination country and then it will involve varying amounts of manual processing to further distribute it. It just feels different.

I don't think it's accurate to consider the internet decentralized. Consider the entire domain name system is under ICANN control with a couple dozen root servers. Or the backbone which is almost entirely owned by Level3, Cogent, and a few other regional carriers.

Redundant is nice, but it's not decentralized.

Did you mean redundant (not or no longer needed or useful; superfluous) or resilient (able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions)?

:)

redundant - /Engineering/ (of a component) not strictly necessary to functioning but included in case of failure in another component.