We need to democratize the internet again, every generation there’s a ma bell pretending they own the internet. Current Gen is Google, AWS, Azure and the like, with ISPs just making sure they get their cut.

I don’t have an issue with these services existing, but in such a way that everything depends on a couple companies? Dangerous for everyone.

“There’s a monopoly” — proceeds to list 3 separate providers. Don’t forget there’s also Akami, now we’re up to 4.

The issue is more so with companies that choose to use cloud providers. They’re the ones attempting to cheap out because they don’t want to pay infrastructure costs. You also have a lack of knowledge by engineers on how to create redundant/reliable systems.

Not everything on the internet went down. There’s plenty that was just fine. So I don’t really don’t know what “democratizing” it would gain, or how.

Monopolies exist exactly like this. With them not competing fairly and coordinating with one another so as to not encroach on theory territory.

Ever wonder why despite there being dozens of ISPs in the country, you’ve only ever got an option for like a main one, and an intentionally shitty one to make the main one look better?

It’s all a rigged game.

My main point, which may have been buried in my quickness to type things, is that it is on the individual companies to choose how they design and architect their systems. This was only a problem in us-east-1. They could have used other AWS regions, they could have used Azure or GCP. They could have used a multi-cloud or hybrid solution, and none of this would be an impact.

AWS is offering infrastructure, but it’s still on the companies to decide how they’ll use it. The ire should be placed on them, just as much, if not more, for taking the easy way out.

Even if you were to have a co-op owned style cloud solution (democratized as it were). If companies choose to only host in one Datacenter/region it’s squarely on them.

A lot of these big names that went down have very poor infrastructure practices if a single region of a single provider took them out. It’s definitely not for lack of money on their part.

You’re right, though. AWS has far more data centers/regions. Even if a company only uses AWS, they can set up High Availability/Disaster Recovery solutions that replicate across AWS regions.

But they won’t because:

• management doesn’t understand the technology, just “cloud good”.
• the experienced tech workers who do understand that you still need HADR in the cloud have all been laid off or retired.
• redundancy costs…wait for it…money.