Decentralization Requires Responsibility. Bitcoin Tech Talk #276

There’s been a recent trend of users being “de-platformed” moving to other platforms. Many have gotten banned from Twitter, so they’ll go to alternatives like Parlor, or Gettr or something else that’s similar. The sentiment is that this platform won’t ban them or add public notices (about COVID or election fraud) on their tweets. The problem, of course, is that there’s no guarantees and it’s very possible that they could get de-platformed from these new places. In addition, as Parlor found out, such platforms rely on other platforms which can de-platform them.

There are multiple layers of centralization in most internet applications. A modern internet service has many single-points-of-failure. The first and most obvious is the service itself. They have a terms of service and user agreement, which almost always have some vague language that amounts to “the company can ban users whenever they want”. But that’s not the only single point of failure. The cloud provider may ban the service. The DDoS prevention platform may ban the service. The DNS may refuse to service the service’s domain. The content delivery provider may refuse to service queries for that service. App stores may ban the app for that service. At the extreme, countries may ban the service from computers within their borders.