Jennifer I believe we are about to get a reversal of the trends to centralisation and regulation. The reason is distributed relatively unregulated systems are more adaptable, lower cost, more private, and more secure. The simple reason is that we can now build and deploy distributed databases where each database “looks after itself” without any centralised control or directories and yet all databases with the same information in them can be treated as though it were a single database. This is sometimes called the distributed ledger problem but various mechanisms exist to make it a reality. One of these is block chain technology. Another is “the federation of one” where the history of an entity with data concerning the entity can be logically considered as a whole even though the data remains distributed.

This changes the economics of the Internet and with it changes the way we do things from centralisation to decentralised.