The Great Centralisation: History of the internet is a tragedy in Four acts

The Great Centralization: History of the internet is a tragedy in Four acts.

The internet was born not by chance, nor as a startup venture seeking funding, but as an essential mechanism for survival.

During the nuclear tensions of the 1960s and 70s, brilliant minds like Paul Baran, Vint Cerf, and Bob Kahn faced a critical challenge: How could a communication network be engineered to remain operational even if half its infrastructure were obliterated?

Their groundbreaking solution was the "mesh" network with no central point, no single master switch, and no head. Data was rerouted seamlessly; It was built for resilience.

Yet, five decades on, this miracle of decentralization is largely managed by a few powerful corporations in Seattle and Silicon Valley, often protected by a single proxy service. These are the three major incidents of this year that took down half of the internet.

December 5, 2025: Cloudflare pushed a routine update to their Web Application Firewall (WAF) to patch a minor React vulnerability.

• The Mistake: A single logic error in the update code (a "killswitch" for a testing tool) triggered a bug that caused their servers to reject valid traffic.
• The Blast Radius: Instantly, 28% of the world's HTTP traffic hit a wall. Zoom calls dropped mid-sentence. LinkedIn vanished. Coinbase users couldn't trade. Even Zerodha (India's largest broker) went dark.
• The Lesson: It wasn't a nuclear bomb that took down the world's communication; it was a bad config file from one company in San Francisco.

November 18, 2025: The Cloudflare "Bad File" Blackout

• What happened: A routine change to a database permission caused a configuration file for Cloudflare's Bot Management system to bloat in size. This "bad file" was pushed globally, instantly crashing the proxy software on every server in their network simultaneously.
• The Impact: X (Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and Discord all went dark at the exact same second.
• The Lesson: We built a "decentralized" edge network, but we manage it with a centralized switch. One bad config file can brick the world's most popular apps.

October 20, 2025: The AWS "US-EAST-1" Collapse

• What happened: A malfunction in a subsystem monitoring network load balancers in Northern Virginia (us-east-1) triggered cascading DNS failures.
• The Impact: It took down 113 separate AWS services. The "blast radius" wiped out Snapchat, Roblox, Ring smart home devices, and banking apps globally.
• The Lesson: We realized that us-east-1 isn't just a data center; it’s a single point of failure for 30% of the internet.

Furthermore, the very "revolution" intended as a safeguard—Web3—is now being acquired en masse by the same financial institutions it was designed to disrupt.

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I. The Architects of the Unbreakable (1969–1995)

We often forget the sheer difficulty of the early internet. The engineers who built ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet) were working with hardware less powerful than a modern digital watch.

They weren't just writing code; they were inventing the laws of digital physics. They created TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), a language that allowed any computer, of any make, to talk to any other computer without a middleman.

The ethos was "dumb network, smart edges." The network didn't care what you were saying or who you were; it just moved packets. Power resided at the edges—with the users.

• The Dream: A global library where no book could be burned.
• The Reality: To be online, you had to be a technician. You ran your own mail server. You hosted your own website on a box in your closet. You were free, but you were also responsible for everything.

II. The Convenience (The Web 2.0 Takeover)

As the internet grew, a friction point emerged: Freedom is exhausting.Managing your own server is hard. Security patches are annoying. If your hard drive fails, your data is gone forever.

Enter the giants. In the mid-2000s, Amazon (AWS), Google, and later Cloudflare offered the world a deal.

"Stop worrying about the hardware. Give us your data. We will host it, secure it, back it up, and serve it to the world faster than you ever could. All for pennies."

We took the deal and changed the topology of the internet.

The Hub-and-Spoke Disaster

We moved from a mesh network to a feudal system.

• The Cloud: Today, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud control the vast majority of the world's backend infrastructure. If us-east-1 (an AWS region) has a hiccup, half the internet—from Netflix to your smart doorbell—stops working.
• The Gatekeeper: Then there is Cloudflare. In our quest to stop DDoS attacks, we routed the world's traffic through one company's reverse proxies. Cloudflare sees, scrubs, and approves a massive percentage of global web traffic.

The engineers of the 70s worked to ensure no single nuclear bomb could kill the network. Today, a single bad configuration update at a data center in Virginia can take it offline. We traded resilience for convenience.

III. The Broken Promise of Web3 (The Infrastructure Lie)

Then came the rebellion. Bitcoin (2009) and Ethereum (2015) arrived with a promise to undo the centralization of Web 2.0.

"Web3 is permissionless. It runs on thousands of nodes. No one can shut it down. It is the return of the open internet."

But look under the hood of your favorite Decentralized App (dApp).

1. Where is the frontend hosted? Usually on AWS or Vercel. If Amazon shuts off the hosting, the "uncensorable" dApp vanishes from the browser.
2. How does the wallet talk to the blockchain? Your MetaMask wallet doesn't run a full Bitcoin or Ethereum node. It connects to the blockchain via RPC (Remote Procedure Call) providers like Infura (owned by Consensys) or Alchemy.
3. The Result: Most of Web3 relies on centralized APIs to function. If Infura decides to block IP addresses from a sanctioned country (which they have done), those users are cut off from the "decentralized" blockchain.

We built a decentralized ledger, but we access it through the same centralized doors we built in the Web 2.0 era.

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IV. The Banker's Takeover

If the infrastructure centralization is disappointing, the financial capture is heartbreaking.

The genesis block of Bitcoin contains a hidden message: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." Satoshi Nakamoto built Bitcoin specifically as a protest against the reckless gambling of institutional banks.

Fifteen years later, the "Cypherpunk" dream is dead. The "Institutional Grade" reality is here.

The ETF Trojan Horse

We cheered when the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) were approved. "Number Go Up," we said. "Mass Adoption," we said.

But look at who is buying:

• BlackRock, Fidelity, and VanEck: These asset managers now hold billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin.
• The Supply Crunch: As these giants vacuum up the supply, Bitcoin shifts from being a peer-to-peer currency to a pristine collateral asset for Wall Street. You aren't supposed to spend it; you're supposed to leverage it.

What about Proof-of-stake?

It is even worse on Proof-of-Stake networks like Ethereum.

To secure the network, you need to stake 32 ETH. Most people can't afford that, and the technical overhead is high (echoing the early internet server problem). So, users hand their ETH to Lido or Coinbase to stake it for them. The result is a massive percentage of all staked Ethereum is controlled by a handful of entities. If regulators pressure these entities to censor transactions, they have the market power to threaten the network's neutrality.

Conclusion: The Cycle Completes

The history of the internet is a tragedy in three acts.

1. Act I: Engineers work hard to build a free, survival-focused mesh network.
2. Act II: We handed the keys to Big Tech because we wanted faster video streaming and easier emails.
3. Act III: Greed took over our attempt to decentralize.
4. Act IV: We built a "decentralized" financial system to escape the banks, only to sell the coins to BlackRock because we wanted our portfolios to turn green.

We have arrived at a strange destination. We have "decentralized" protocols running on Amazon servers, funded by Venture Capitalists, and bought by Investment Banks.