I am baffled by the current state of the internet. More than half of the internet relies on a small group of dominant players like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and Apple. This overreliance on a few entities is concerning. If any of these players experiences a significant disruption, such as Amazon or Cloudflare, it could result in the outage or degraded services of numerous major products and companies.
I understand the appeal of cloud providers, as they are often affordable and convenient, particularly for startups, bootstrapped companies, and enthusiasts. However, I question the long-term viability and cost-effectiveness of not having at least a portion of the infrastructure on-premises. Nowadays, there are plenty of companies offering colocation services, with servers becoming more affordable than ever. With decreasing costs in storage, bandwidth, and other resources, why does the majority still rely entirely on these big players?
Wasn’t the primary objective of the internet to facilitate interoperability, privacy, freedom, and connectivity? Sadly, these principles seem to be fading away in practice. If everyone centralizes their operations within a few major players, governments around the world will increasingly dictate what can or cannot enter their respective countries, as we have witnessed in China, Russia, and others who have already flirted with these ideas.
Major corporations are needlessly complicating the lives of individuals, companies, and developers. Take, for example, Google and Apple, whose controversial App/Play Store policies, along with the efforts of Google and Microsoft to add complexity to the lives of those managing their own email servers, demonstrate a tendency to create reasons to label legitimate emails as spam. The list of such instances continues to grow.
What’s most disconcerting is the realization that companies that once championed slogans like “No BS” or “Don’t be evil” have ironically become the very entities they vowed not to emulate—all for the pursuit of profit, even at the expense of others’ privacy.
I believe that all companies, developers, and enthusiasts with the capability for on-premises infrastructure should embrace this path…
Additionally, it’s crucial to shift towards relying on open protocols and implementing end-to-end encryption to enhance privacy for both ourselves and users.