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I ran across adiabatic's reply[1] to some random musings[2] of mine on a potential alternate present where IPv6 was adopted before the widespread popularization of the Internet.
I admit that perhaps from a user standpoint this might not be particularly visible and maybe I should have added more context in the original post. IANA (the organization responsible for assigning all kinds of numbers on the Internet) ran out of IPv4 address blocks to allocate to the 5 Internet regions (RIRs) a while ago. ARIN (the RIR for North America) ran out of their IPv4 free space in 2015. From a provider standpoint things have been bad for IPv4 for most of the last decade.
I 100% agree on this in our current time line. The reality though is that everyone already has at least one. Your 'modem' (really your CPE) is likely running at least one unpatched Linux distribution inside of it that you have little to no control over. If you have integrated WiFi you likely have two, provided by two different manufacturers.
I agree here as well, except for the part where the problem is solved. I think the very fact that we're giving up a tremendous amount of privacy and security to huge corporations is that the problem isn't solved. The problem has simply been effectively monetized.
But that wasn't really the point I was trying to drive at. I was trying to imagine if those very corporate hegemonies would have been able to exist. If the Internet remained capable of true peer-to-peer communication without a central mediator service, would we have these giant central mediator services?
I still think it's useful to dare to dream of such things.
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