[TheSageMage]

Not trying to throw salt in the argument for democracy, but isn't your argument the digital equivalent of "Why doesn't everyone do everything for themselves to overthrow the dependency on unstable corporations"?

It'd be great if everything was decentralized, everyone encrypted all their messages, used tor to mask their activities. At some point though, these would require the average person to learn a lot about the network and systems they use, otherwise they risk not using it correctly and invalidating the point. If these services are provided to them, they don't have to think about all these factors when using the network, they can specialize, allowing it to be more accessible. It seems that the people vote has been on more accessible, but it is starting to look like the foxes are running the hen house for the internet these days.

That being said, what Turkey is doing is scary.

> The government has not officially commented on the outage. But the Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications Ministry told the state-run agency, "Instead of coordinating against terrorism, (Wikipedia) has become part of an information source which is running a smear campaign against Turkey in the international arena."

This shows a profound lack of understanding of how a basic site like Wikipedia works, which is either ignorant or malicious, and the latter sounds likely in this day and age.

[xj9]

i said decentralized, not distributed. decentralization has plenty of room for centers, the point is not to have just one. having specialized service providers is fine, the problems start to crop up when we don't have real choices. for natural monopolies, i'd argue that a cooperative model would work well.