The internet is no longer a safe haven

The problem with anything, anything, without a centralized authority, is that friction overwhelms inertia. Bad actors exist and have no mercy, while good people downplay them until it’s too late. Entropy always wins. Misguided people assume the problem is powerful people, when the problem is actually what the powerful people use their authority to do, as powerful people will always exist. Accepting that and maintaining oversight is the historically successful norm; abolishing them has always failed.

As such, I don’t identify with the author of this post, about trying to resist CloudFlare for moral reasons. A decentralized system where everyone plays nice and mostly cooperates, does not exist any more than a country without a government where everyone plays nice and mostly cooperates. It’s wishful thinking. We already tried this with Email, and we’re back to gatekeepers. Pretending the web will be different is ahistorical.

The internet has made the world small and that's a problem. Nation states typically had a limited range of broadcasting their authority in the more distant past. A bad ruler couldn't rule the entire world, nor could they cause trouble with the entire world. From nukes to the interconnected web the worst of us with power can effect everyone else.

Power is a spectrum. Power differentials will always exist but we can absolutely strive to make them smaller and smaller.

1) Most of the civilized world no longer has hereditary dictators (such as "kings"). Because they were removed from power by the people and the power was distributed among many individuals. It works because malicious (anti-social) individuals have trouble working together. And yes, oversight helps.

But it's a spectrum and we absolutely can and should move the needle towards more oversight and more power distribution.

2) Corporate power structures are still authoritarian. We can change that too.