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 16 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 17 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.

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degamad 15 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.

	▲	skydhash 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I believe it was because they considered securing the physical apparatus. Are memo secured? Are books secured? At the small scale of the networks at that time, few things were worth securing.