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.
The root servers kind of do, along with central authorities like ICANN which gatekeep the TLDs
Confusing the TLD situation for ownership is making the same “distributed, authoritative” mistake.
As there are multiple places where the family photos can be posted (Facebook, 500px, Google, etc), that demonstrates that the web is decentralized.
What it may not be is distributed, where one can easily self-host:
* https://berty.tech/blog/decentralized-distributed-centralize...
The presence of choice only means there are multiple centralized systems not interconnecting.
This is why the web is highly centralized despite choice and why Web3 won’t work. Web3 is focused upon federated solutions. A federated solution is semi-autonomous, less centralized than the web but not fully decentralized.
Things exist on a spectrum. I have autonomy to choose where to (e.g.) host my family photos, and even self-host on a VPS or even perhaps at home (either with a static IP or dynamic DNS). While things may moved towards more centralization with Big Tech, does not mean it is centralized, just perhaps less decentralized / distributed.
> multiple centralized systems
This phrase approaches an oxymoron in my mind. (Bearing in mind de/centralization being on a spectrum.)
Autonomy is the ease with which people are free to move between those governments.
I suspect people view the web as decentralized because they cannot divorce their thinking from concepts like content is king and a client/server model.
But you wouldn't say that the governing of Earth in total is centralized (e.g., the UN (with their black helicopters/s)).
Going back to my link:
> As its name implies, decentralized systems don’t have one central owner. Instead, they use multiple central owners, each of which usually stores a copy of the resources users can access.
> A decentralized system can be just as vulnerable to crashes as a centralized one. However, it is by design more tolerant to faults. That’s because when one or more central owners or servers fail, the others can continue to provide data access to users.
* https://berty.tech/blog/decentralized-distributed-centralize...
Or Baran (1964):
> For example, type (b) in Fig. 1 shows the hierarchical structure of a set of stars connected to the form of a larger star with an additional link forming a loop. Such a network is sometimes called a "decentralized" network, because complete reliance upon a single point is not always required.
* https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand...
This is a hard truth that web3 will have to face: centralization happens naturally in decentralized systems.
As a recent web3 example, when twitter teased the idea of verified NFT avatars, half the comments were saying things like that they should piggyback on OpenSea verification so that people don’t just re-mint other people’s NFTs.
OpenSea has taken investment a $10b valuation, to me that implies that the people financially backing web3 think they’ll be able to extract rent by being a central player in it.
The whole point of DNS is to normalize an easy to remember name to an address so that everyone can access that same address easily. That is almost the purest essence of centralization.
In practice if you want to share family photos with your family do you upload those photos to a third party like a social media site or a cloud provider for all your family to access? That is centralized: an agreed upon location for everyone to access.
In contrast decentralization means no third party. Grandma pushing the family photos directly onto the kids hard drive from across the network, for example.
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.
The goal of the web, as it was invented. was to allow decentralized content access via hyperlinks. That vision is essentially dead. Content is now an index on a database behind a walled garden.
On the web content is king. In a true decentralized platform autonomy and availability are king while content is trivial.