"If you just imagine teleporting yourself back to 1970, and somone who was looking forward to the PC revolution - which was going to happen in just a few years - was like 'alright, we're not going to have entire rooms full of computer stuff anymore, and you're not going to have a mainframe that you connect to to do everything. Everything's going to work on these little boxes people have in their home'."
"Well, fast forward to today, and actually the people who were doing the mainframe stuff - even though during the 80s that wasn't happening - here we are right back again, where there's giant rooms full of computer stuff and everyone does effectively go to the mainframe to get their data."
Casey goes on to imply that because moves towards decentralisation have been met by countermoves towards re-centralisation, we are fated to have our computing controlled by giant chokepoints. Like content platforms and datacentres owned by corporations. His proposed solution is requiring the companies running the services at these chokepoints to follow due process.
I think Casey overstates his case against decentralisation as a solution. I agree that the forces driving centralisation are not merely technical, so technical fixes alone aren't enough. But imagine the hackers of the 70s had understood the political-economic forces that led to the mainframe model as well as they did the technical ones. Arguably, if they'd organised to mitigate both, the Great Re-centralisation of computing could have been avoided.
It's easy to agree with imposing due process requirements on services like the existing DataFarms, commercial operations that have become so large and so dominant they are de facto common carriers (and I include AWS in that). But what about services set up by one person on a PC in their closet, so they can chat with their friends?
Does it really make sense to apply the same rules to a house party that we apply to a mall? If not, how do we fairly define where due process rules apply?
Fortunately, lawmakers are learning how to apply different rules to different situations when regulating the net. Laws like the EU DMA lay out criteria for when a service becomes a "gatekeeper", dominant enough to be subject to the consumer protection rules in that law. Rules that are potentially complicated and expensive to follow.
We could have similar criteria for triggering due process requirements, so they only apply to services large enough to be considered a gatekeeper.
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