Centralization and decentralization of the Internet

I went to Google to ask how to solve an error... But Google was itself down from an error

@covid19indiaorg Google services briefly disrupted today. Student with limited access to internet/electricity/device, trying to attend online classes: "My daily story".

@RugbyBarrister Listening to stories of Google customers (who have gone full Google mode at home with the home app) unable to turn on/off their lights today.

@drisso1893 TFW you spend 10 months organizing a conference and the only thing that you did not consider is Google being down preventing your attendees to sign onto the platform! #googledown #disasteraverted #EuroBioc2020

@cykwek77 @googlecloud Your links do not work. Is there any number that I can call or any live chat that I can reach for assistance?

@JohnnyICS @googlecloud After the DOWN of 14.12.2020 I can no longer log into my Gmail. I get response ad if it no longer existed, as if it had been deleted. Will the error really be "temporary"? H E L P !!

@Mubashirshafi @googlecloud Getting notifications for password breach. Do I need to worry about it?

@shashishankar Today, after years of wanderlust, my searched for life's meaning was about to end and at the same moment #Google came down.

@Surbhi_Vedi Maybe #google is trying to teach us a lesson- it provides us access to infinite information for free, yet some of us make ill-informed decisions all the time.

@Cleobatta Here's a theory: Google was down on purpose as a social experiment to motivate the visibility of its value and impact. They're measuring our future willingness to pay for their services.

@KrishnamHQ Google just tested it's effect on humanity. The might have switched off the services for sometime and might be laughing at the back enjoying the chaos. We should understand and realise how these tech giants can do to humanity. #techfiction #googledown

@pzwsk Google is an infrastructure (web) relying on another infra (internet) relying on another infra (electricity) and all those infra are there because we have the power to move things (oil). You are excited about #googledown? You are going to enjoy #peakoil ...

@CoinDesk This morning was a jarring reminder of the hidden costs of the easy-to-use, centralized systems that permeate the web. #googledown

Raymond Zhong and Adam Satariano, 2021, Facebook's Apps Went Down. The World Saw How Much It Runs on Them, The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/technology/facebook-down-ig-down-whatsapp-down.html

The Facebook outage on Monday was a planetary-scale demonstration of how essential the company's services have become to daily life. Messenger have long been more than just a way to chat and share photos. They are critical platforms for doing business, arranging medical care, conducting virtual classes, carrying out political campaigns, responding to emergencies and much, much more.

• In Mexico, politicians were cut off from their constituents.

• In Turkey and Kenya, shopkeepers couldn't sell their wares.

• And in Colombia, a nonprofit organization that uses WhatsApp to connect victims of gender-based violence to lifesaving services found its work impaired.

YouTube is trying to figure out exactly how many ads its users will tolerate before heading elsewhere. Some social media users in recent weeks have complained about seeing eight or even 10 consecutive unskippable pre-roll ads; before a video begins, YouTube typically will display two pre-roll ads. (Goldman, 2022)

We like to think of Bumper ads as [a quick and fun format and as] little haikus of video ads – and we're excited to see what the creative community will do with them. (Lupier, 2016)

Mastodon is divided into groups, called servers, based on many topics including the UK, snooker, and security.

Twitter has blocked links to some of the largest servers which users would join, including the most popular "social" channel.

And Twitter is also stopping users from adding links to their Mastodon account in their bios - calling them "malware".

Tom Gerken, december 2022, BBC News. bbc.co.uk

Invention of packet fragmentation and routing.

Zoom

Anyone can plug itself to the Internet, without authorization of any central authority, use and provide contents and services.