Merely knowing who controls the nodes doesn’t mean you actually can trivially censor them: if you have thousands of nodes controlled by different organisations globally you’ll have a much harder time censoring them than a distributed system where a single organisation has a significant share.
Agreed, you want the nodes to be controlled by many different entities globally, but that should be a function of the technical implementation of the distributed system rather than having to identify a responsible party that is accountable for this objective. Privacy is crucial to ensure a distributed system continues to function; otherwise, orgs or individuals running nodes could be censored in mass by authorities or participants may stop using the system due to security concerns.
While reading this, I tried to apply what they mention at the beginning of the Centralization and Decentralization sections, that is that both are continuums.
They try to quantify this using "centralization risk". For some functions, greater decentralization might be not worth the effort, is actually undesirable, or even impossible due to technical reasons. For others, these are in greater number, everything should be done to prevent centralization.
Ummm, what? If something is decentralized, then that's kind of the point that you can't hold "someone accountable for how the function is performed". If you could hold someone accountable, then you would be able to censor the function at that point of control. This just seems like a criticism of decentralization as a whole.
Also, at the beginning of the Decentralization Techniques section they said...
> "Choosing the appropriate techniques for decentralization requires balancing the specific goals of the function against centralization risk, because completely precluding all forms of centralization through technical means is rarely achievable."
So is it that decentralization is impossible to achieve or that it's achievable, but undesirable? I feel like I'm being gaslighted by the IETF.