November 20, 2009

speaking of hills and valleys...

I found this great blog post by Chris Dixon via Twitter.

The core services built on top of the internet – the web (HTTP), email (SMTP), subscription messaging (RSS) – were made similarly open and therefore distributible across institutions.  This explains their remarkable system-wide reliability.  It also explains why we should be worried about reliability when core internet services are owned by a single company.

(See also.)