IETF Draft: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards

Re:IETF Draft: Centralization, Decentralization, and Interne... by gsnedders on Monday July 11, 2022 @07:26AM (#32054681)

Not all parties are necessarily equal: if you have a distributed system, but 90% of the nodes are controlled by Google (or Meta, or Amazon, etc.) do you actually have a distributed system? It can be important to know who controls the nodes in a distributed system, and this can often be opaque or designed to be undiscoverable. This is the concern in those places.

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.

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Re:IETF Draft: Centralization, Decentralization, and Interne... by ahnick on Monday July 11, 2022 @08:29AM (#32055250)

If 90% of the nodes are controlled by Google, then I think the answer is clear that you do NOT in fact have a distributed system. If this occurs, then the system was not designed well and should be abandoned for a new one.

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.

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