The Lure of a Fully Decentralized Internet

Until the 1980s, most communication

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networks were relatively centralized. In the United States, AT&T had a monopoly that was regulated by the government. Connections were dedicated, point-to-point channels, and the attachment of foreign devices (meaning anything not manufactured by AT&T’s Western Electric Co. subsidiary) was forbidden. I remember with embarrassment my testimony at the federal antitrust trial, trying halfheartedly to justify AT&T’s fallback strategy of allowing digital connections to such devices via a Western Electric “data coupler.”

The antitrust trial resulted in the dismantling of AT&T. At the same time, the rise of the Internet was causing centralized communication networks to unravel. The Internet was designed to be open and decentralized. Packet switching ensured robustness, and the Internet Protocol enforced open and universal interconnection. The end-to-end principle—whereby the network’s job is simply to move data from one point to another while making the existence of all the points in between as invisible as possible—became a guiding philosophy of network transparency.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/the-lure-of-a-fully-decentralized-internet