Session Date/Time: 21 Jul 2025 15:00

dinrg

Summary

The dinrg meeting featured presentations and discussions centered around the decentralization of the internet. Topics included measuring centralization, government hosting consolidation, the impact of technological advancements on centrality, and experiments in decentralized video distribution. The meeting explored the complex interplay of technology, economics, and policy in shaping the landscape of internet decentralization.

Key Discussion Points

Defining Centralization: The initial presentation highlighted the lack of a formal definition for "centralization" and proposed a statistical approach using the Earth Movers distance to quantify it across different countries and internet functions. The metric tries to capture the underlying provider distribution.
Government Hosting Consolidation: A presentation examined government reliance on third-party hosting providers, highlighting the consolidation of government content on platforms like Cloudflare and the potential implications for resilience and sovereignty. The presentation made a distinction between hosting content and the path taken to reach the content.
Impact of Technological Abundance on Centrality: A presentation argued that technological abundance, driven by Moore's Law, has led to the prevalence of cloud-based services and pre-provisioning, fundamentally altering the nature of networking and making traditional concepts of decentralization less relevant. The main driver of consolidation is simply the cost of competing in the market, not malicious behavior.
Decentralized Video Distribution: A presentation discussed an experiment to distribute IETF meeting videos using Peertube, aiming to provide an alternative to centralized platforms like YouTube and promote greater control over content distribution.
Regulation, Antitrust and Control: The discussion touched on the interplay of the different centralization forces and potential government intervention by either regulation or anti-trust laws. Regulation may be harmful for decentralization.

Decisions and Action Items

Christiane Huitemey's Peertube project: Continue exploration with the IETF tools team, address licensing issues, branding, finding stability, and ensure content availability in China.

Next Steps

Continued discussion and analysis of centralization metrics and their relevance to different internet functions.
Further exploration of the economic and social implications of centralization, particularly in the context of AI and content distribution.
Progress on the Peertube experiment to provide a decentralized alternative for IETF video distribution.