i would disagree we kind of figured it out early. Early visions for internet were about things like information superhighway (with a centralized approach). What came to pass was the opposite. Its a good thing. There are lessons here in that we are not always accurate at predicting what the future would look like. But we can always identify trends that may shape the future.

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Nevermark 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The Internet was specifically designed to be maximally decentralized to be robust even to war.

The first web browser was designed to be completely peer to peer.

But you are right about getting it wrong. The peer to peer capabilities still exist, but a remarkable amount of what we now consider basic infrastructure is owned by very large centralized corporations. Despite long tails of hopeful or niche alternatives.

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TeMPOraL 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The Internet was specifically designed to be maximally decentralized to be robust even to war.

That's packet switching, which is layer 3. Layer 7 is only ever getting more centralized.

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Karrot_Kream 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The Internet was specifically designed to be maximally decentralized to be robust even to war.

This is a bit naive. Until TLS, TCP traffic on down was sent in the clear. Most traffic used to be sent in the clear. This is what makes packet filtering and DPI possible. Moreover things like DNS Zones and IP address assignment are very centralized. There are cool projects out there that aim to be more decentralized internets, but unfortunately the original Internet was just not very good at being robust.

	▲	degamad 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It was robust against disruption, but it was not secure against attacks. The threat model that was considered was bombs blowing up routers, but at the time, intermediaries intercepting traffic was not considered.

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pmontra 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, if we look at the flow of most of internet traffic we don't have highways (I'm thinking about the USA East/West North/South highway matrix).

Instead we have roads that go straight from suburbs to a few big city centers. Sometimes a new center rise, but it's still very centralized. I'd say that the prediction was correct. What they failed to foresee is that we don't connect to libraries and newspapers, we connect to Netflix, FB, Instagram etc.