Less than 20 companies actually own more than 80% of the internet capacity, which is the storage and the compute. Stop metaversing. Decentralize physical infrastructure.
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Replying to @LucaVJ85 @interfluidity
Everyone's always rediscovering Zipf's law! It would be weird if it were not the case
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left alone, things often tend to statistical distributions which suggest that things oughtn't be left alone. it's easy to make these quasiphysical apologies for wealth and income distribution. "natural" in this sense is not normative.
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Replying to @interfluidity @LucaVJ85
Left alone, internet infrastructure will tend to monopoly, which is bad. But it's also silly to imagine an internet where mom-and-pop ISP's lay transpacific cable or operate cloud datacenters. A situation where 20 companies own 80% of the infrastructure sounds perfectly sensible
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That's fair to argue! For most industries, a desirable outcome is probably tens of medium-sized firms and a market still contestable by upstarts, not a zillion perpetual mom-and-pops. It's Amazon/Google/MS that seem like particularly undesirable concentrations.
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Replying to @interfluidity @LucaVJ85
A confounding problem here is our inability to write error-free software. These places have to defend against state actors and only the very largest can field capable security teams. This leaves no room for medium-sized middle ground, there's just giants and pipsqueaks like me
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Bruce Schneier described it at one point as a feudal system, where you need to bend the knee to some sufficiently powerful lord or you are toast. This extreme vulnerability to malicious actors is another driver of concentration in tech, and a really tough tradeoff
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I'm not sure it's right, though. Giants are hugely concentrated targets. I'd presume that AWS/MS/Goog are as thoroughly inflitrated as Twitter, which keeps leaking private data to low-rent state actor Saudi Arabia. I think the trade-offs are a bit complicated and uncertain.
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Replying to @interfluidity @LucaVJ85
I really think there's a qualitative difference. It's important to compare like with like here, too—Twitter doesn't offer document storage, cloud services, a mobile device operating system or web browser. There's maybe a half dozen companies that can defend that kind of thing.
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I'd invite
@tqbf to give a more qualified opinion than mine on this topic. But I agree the tradeoffs are not simple or easy to analyze. The one point I'd insist on is that there's a defect-driven centralizing force in software and hardware that doesn't exist in other industries.2 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
My proposed nomenclature for the fact that all software is born defective and only enormous companies can afford a security team skilled enough to find and paper over egregious vulnerabilities is "economies of fail"
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i do think the jury is still out about all this. claims for special economies among behemoths often seem unassailable for a while, until the behemoth breaks and the supposed economy is revealed a bit of a fraud or bezzle. 1/
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Replying to @interfluidity @Pinboard and
it’s obviously possible these enormous companies break in some awful way. i consider it likely that they are “broken”: the security model here is really that entities capable of breaking them don’t wish to undermine the value of their assets by revealing their capabilities. 2/
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