Amazon's Echo - Alexa Voice Service presented at the IFA in Berlin, Germany, 1 September 2017. Photo: Britta Pedersen/Press Association. All rights reserved.In my previous article I argued that the growing concerns regarding the internet’s social impact is rooted in many different causes: from underlying social problems, to bad science, to bad incentive structures put in place by big platforms, to the ongoing process of centralization that affects the web (the content layer that sits on top of the internet).
I defined centralization as the process through which intermediaries reshape the architecture of the web, increasing their gatekeeping power over the information that circulates through it.
I argued that the centralization of the web is creating the single point of failure that the original decentralized architecture sought to avoid, and that this should be the key concern of policy-makers hoping to deal with citizen concerns regarding the online. The centralization of the web is creating the single point of failure that the original decentralized architecture sought to avoid… this should be the key concern.
