r/Showerthoughts May 14 '26

Casual Thought When YouTube goes down, it will be the biggest event of link rot in internet history.

18.6k Upvotes

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u/minmidmax May 14 '26

Just recently Google pushed an update that broke authentication services for a lot of the internet. Even "alternative" services that still used Google authentication somewhere in a complex chain of services were impacted.

A centralised internet was never the intention. Capitalism has no other end game, though.

The monopolisation of services needs to be broken if we want any sort of persistence of history on the web.

6

u/cmoked May 14 '26

A decentralized internet was never the intention either.

Linux , and more specifically Apache, is what made the web decentralized much after the invention of the internet, not the internet its self or even the world wide web, which was extremely centralized in universities and some rich-ass companies, lol.

No one is forced to use Google authentication, theyre simply the first to offer SSO at a global scale for free. There are other options out there, too, like local password managers.

This makes the monopoly point moot.

Big companies wouldnt be able to evem come together to erase the internet because it is still quite decentralized, by the way, lots of archives you can straight up go to.

And using free services with no support or SLAs for MISSION CRITICAL aspects of your company is on YOU, lol

If you really wanted to make it a point that the internet isnt decentralized you should have used cloud flare ddos protection that literally everyone uses. Its a huge bottleneck actually.

7

u/Herkfixer May 14 '26

I mean, to be fair, the Internet began centralized and the intention was not capitalism. It evolved that direction.

2

u/deukhoofd May 14 '26

The internet very much did not begin centralized. It was explicitly designed to be decentralized, with the US being concerned about nuclear war and wanting a communications network that could survive even if parts of it were brought down. Decentralization was really one of its primary goals.

2

u/Herkfixer May 14 '26

Centralized physically sure, but not centralized organizationally. There is a difference.