Centralization can happen for technical reasons but 99% of the time is about power and money, where a big company benefits enormously from owning a walled garden.
It was always very political. Feudal-society-vs-democracy level of political.
> The idea isn't unlike competition / anti-trust laws. But would it require making new ones?
Good question. If anti-trust laws were applied to network protocols the same way they are currently applied to all sort of physical goods, it would be already illegal to create walled gardens based on closed protocols (e.g. instant messaging).
> Centralization can happen for technical reasons but 99% of the time is about power and money
"Power" (control) is important for security and compliance and centralized software offers it.
Imagine your role is to select tools that the engineers in your organization will use to collaborate as they create and access org IP, or even customer data. You personally favor decentralized F/LOSS solutions; you don't control the whole world, but why not deploy decentralized solutions in the realm that you do control? You'll just need to tick some boxes: How will you comply with a request to purge a certain customer's data? How will you restrict a former employee's access to your IP? How will you detect a hackers attempt to exfiltrate data from one of your decentralized nodes? What if you must provide employee communications logs to comply with a court order?
Ticking these boxes doesn't preclude a p2p file dissemination, but they do require centralized controls, centralized logging, centralized backups, centralized monitoring.
Because decentralized arrangements prevent or complicate compliance, even people who support decentralization and have the budget and authority to do something about it are prevented from rolling it out.
Centralization can happen for technical reasons but 99% of the time is about power and money, where a big company benefits enormously from owning a walled garden.
It was always very political. Feudal-society-vs-democracy level of political.
> The idea isn't unlike competition / anti-trust laws. But would it require making new ones?
Good question. If anti-trust laws were applied to network protocols the same way they are currently applied to all sort of physical goods, it would be already illegal to create walled gardens based on closed protocols (e.g. instant messaging).