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The situation

What the Internet should have been

The TCP/IP protocol, on which the Internet was built, was designed so that each connected device can be both client and server. It was intended to result in a distributed structure rather similar to this:

What the Internet has become

But in practice, the Internet has become a service space: we have customers (u) on one side, and servers (s) on the other. This has resulted in a “multi-star” structure: in the world, we have billions of users connected on a handful of services that everyone knows (including GAFAM). In this structure, no two users are directly connected to each other, they all have to go through a service. Some people rightly speak of Minitel 2.0:

Internet service providers

And we must also mention at this point the internet service providers (isp) which have a central role: they are the link between users and services.

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