In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, explores the economic inevitability of centrality in the modern Internet. Despite the IETF’s long-standing commitment to open standards and end-to-end protocol design, these principles have not prevented large players across infrastructure, applications, and data centres from consolidating power by acquiring smaller competitors and avoiding shared competition.
Part of this trend is driven by efficiency, part by the economic realities of Moore’s law, and the need to recover heavy capital investment within limited timeframes. Networking itself has, in effect, become ‘free’. Instead of an end-to-end Internet, we now rely on highly localized and replicated sources of data. The real costs lie in land, electricity, and cooling, which naturally favour concentration. Networks and protocols have little influence over who controls these assets.
The network still exists, of course, but increasingly, data flows over private links and is not subject to open protocol design imperatives.
A quote from Peter Thiel highlights how the modern venture capitalist in our space does not actively seek to operate in a competitive market. As Peter famously stated: “competition is for losers” — it can be hard to avoid the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ labels talking about this, but Geoff is clear he isn’t here to argue what is right or wrong, simply to observe the behaviour and the consequences.
Geoff presented these ideas to the Decentralized Internet Research Group (DINRG) at the recent IETF meeting in Madrid. As he notes, ‘distributed’ does not mean ‘decentralized’. We have achieved the former, but the latter continues to elude us.
Read more about the policy issues of the modern Internet at DINRG (IETF) and on the APNIC Blog.
- Decentralizing Services? (Geoff Huston, presentation to DINRG at IETF123 Madrid)
- Centralization topics at the APNIC Blog
- DINRG at the IETF Wiki (IETF web page)
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