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First of all the problem, as it often is, comes from centralization on the internet.

Which is a matter of government policy. When the internet was invented, hackers and cypherpunks said it should be decentralized. Lobbyists and Congressmen said it would be subsidized as something along the lines of television: few senders, many receivers. And then ISPs even said: we'll take public subsidies for infrastructure and not even build the infrastructure.

The result is that America and Canada in specific have crappy net access, and the world at large has a centralized internet rather than a decentralized one. Why? Because nobody ever required that we commoners receive publicly-visible IP addresses and symmetric bandwidth with which to run our own servers.



Very well said. These things are certainly relevant. But now that we have WebRTC and Adobe Cirrus, etc. can we start building decentralized, P2P apps?

After all I don't care how the connection is opened as long as it's encrypted I have choice in how it's opened.




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