Posts tagged centralization

There’s a good research report that was just published. It’s called “Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future?” It’s by Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula, and Ethan Zuckerman, under the auspices of The​ ​Center​ ​for​ ​Civic​ ​Media​ ​& The​ ​Digital​ ​Currency​ ​Initiative at the MIT​ ​Media​ ​Lab. What is decentralization? Take the web: Anyone can set up a web page and link to any other web page. That’s decentralized. Anyone can make a search engine to find those web pages. That’s centralized. The search engine can add blogging. That’s Google + Blogger. Now it’s both a publisher and a search engine. It has more power. Decentralized things are harder to manage and use. Centralized things end up easy to use and make money for relatively few people. The web is inherently decentralized, which has made it much easier for large companies to create large, centralized platforms. It’s a paradox and very thorny.

via https://trackchanges.postlight.com/decentralize-it–2c9f0bc2ed8e