Can technology curb centralization in the Internet?

PING

APNIC's Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, joins PING for his month chat, to share his thoughts on discussions at the recent meeting of the Decentralized Internet Infrastructure Research Group (DINRG) at IETF 114.

The DINRG investigates open research issues in decentralizing infrastructure services such as trust management, identity management, name resolution, resource/asset ownership management, and resource discovery with a focus on infrastructure services that can benefit from decentralization or that are difficult to realize in local, potentially connectivity-constrained networks.

For Geoff the discussion about whether technology has led to centralization is misplaced — technology was merely and will remain simply a lever that 'The Big' use to remain big. Rather the discussion needs to focus on the economic factors that have historically repeated themselves and allowed the biggest companies of the world to control their markets.

Read more about Centralization in the Internet on the APNIC Blog:

• Opinion: consolidation, centralization, and the Internet architecture
• Opinion: Is big necessarily bad?
• 13 propositions on an Internet for a burning world (1-4)
• How centralized is DNS traffic becoming?
• TLS 1.3: A story of experimentation and centralization

The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.