Hi Geoff,
Great talk, gloomy as expected but good for triggering discussions!
Please see comments on the last paragraph below.
Best,
Dirk
[SNIP]
But the abundance is so great and the level of centrality so overarching that none of these actors have the slightest incentive to share any more. So they separately design, construct and operate their own infrastructure - no sharing.
That’s way I feel it is just too late to bend this around now.
[DOT] I think your observations on scarcity are correct but incentives are something regulation can impact together with economics; the EC's initiative on decentralized systems (https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/ebsi) could be one such trigger.
[DOT] while this group is less involved in such regulatory discussions, the technical side of decentralization is something that we can contribute to. Unlike CloudFlare's approach to centralizing all named services onto even a single IP address (i.e. DC), name-based routing approaches that remove the reliance on the DNS (which today is funneled through Google in many cases - all for the sake of 'privacy'; why again should I hand even my DNS data to Google?) and allow for decentralized service hosting (why can't I do my own webdav storage at home; needing to maintain an awful pinholing into my own home network instead of just using my own URL) may be a contribution to that decentralization toolbox, while catering to the changed dynamics of the compute/storage resource availability.
[DOT] Also another question is that of use cases that may rely on decentralization. DLT comes to mind with applications in finance, eID, and distributed storage. Network innovations needed here? An upcoming IIC whitepaper on "impact of DLTs on provider networks" is planned for release in December and will show some impact the current overlay routing in DLTs has on the networks but also the DLT performance itself.
[DOT] so it may be doom right now but markets have been evolving towards but also away from monopolies in the past, so I don't see the end game here.
> On 11 Nov 2021, at 8:27 am, Adrian Farrel <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Hi Geoff,
>
> Thanks for finding a slot at crazy-o'clock to talk to us today.
>
> Actually, I didn't find your message so depressing from a technology
> point of view (the social message is something else and it brings us
> to the debate between computer engineering and social engineering
> which is a whole different place).
>
> One thing that made me think was that you started by noting that "time
> is short" and ended with "it's too late." Do you think we are on an
> inevitable path, already at the destination, or are we embarked on a
> voyage where we could pull back?
>
> In the latter case (which I guess I hope for) is there stuff that the
> research community can do to help us understand the situation and
> maybe make the right choices. I guess that would not be totally a
> technical piece of work, but the engineering research might feed and
> strengthen the societal debate.
>
> Best,
> Adrian
>
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