[micro_softy]

The author argues DDoS causes centralization because it's "just too easy to knock unprotected websites offline" and so they need to pay some organization that makes money from centralization for "protection".

This assumes that the centralized topology and usage of the internet as it is implemented will never change, despite the fact that by design an internet can be decentralized and therefore resilient. Isn't that what Paul Baran thought made it a useful idea?

Imagine for a moment that the internet really was like a mesh net instead of several lengths of heavy rope frayed at the ends. Imagine it looked like Paul Baran's sketches.

True or false:

If there was not such reliance on "backbones" and "ISPs" then knocking some endpoint offline would not necessarily threaten the connections of others and would not be costly to anyone except the target. DDoS would only affect a small portion of the network mesh. There would be multiple ways for point A to reach point C besides going through B.

True or false:

If internet users demanded peer-to-peer connections instead of accepting firewalled, calf-cow access to "websites" then there would be no need for DDoS protection, because knocking a website offline would not stop people from getting the served content from other endpoints. The attacker would have to knock offline every supernode that an endpoint could possibly access or every node listed in a distributed hash table.