IMHO, Centralization has occurred for two reasons, simplicity & social. I don’t believe the use of the internet can redistribute until:
- there is a ubiquitous, decentralized, protocol level, solution for creating content that doesn’t require technical skill (servers, markup, etc)
- there is an adopted standard to make social graphs portable, decentralized, and private
The mass of the internet is not technical. They will always choose services that are inexpensive (both from a financial and effort standpoint). Frankly, for non-technical users, decentralization has no immediate advantage.
Services, themselves, are not incentivized to decentralize either.
More than likely, the down market forces IoT is creating will enable technical folks to do new & interesting things. In time, that will consolidate. Ultimately, it will be used to reduce costs for and increase the stickiness of centralized services.
Essentially, I’m arguing that the ideal of de-centralization is fighting a loosing battle against the availability of people’s time/effort and the fundamental forces that drive market economics. It’s Adam Smith’s invisible hand at work.
