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Thomas Jones's avatar

is decentralization worth saving? or is it just the road to anarchy. People do want freedom of action, but is that necessarily incompatible with centralization of a common set of rules. Clearly Stalin wanted centalization, pushed hard to enable centralization of control and it failed him.. All of Russian society wound up in misery. The network effect (Metcalfe’s Law) seems to force centalization. Does anyone think Metcalfe’s Law is not a fact?

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Eve Maler's avatar

Are network effects always dependent on centralization, and always to the same degree? That part seems variable. In traditional federated-identity land, specifically in Research/Education, we have examples of large mesh federations (no hub) and also large brokered federations (central hub).

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Thomas Jones's avatar

Research/Education also has a huge federated ID system for things like library access. = Remember Internet 2 and Ken Klingenstein?

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Eve Maler's avatar

Absolutely!

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