Communications of the ACM

practice
YEARS AGO I squandered most of my summer break
locked inside my apartment, tackling an obscure
problem in network theory—the bidirectional channel
capacity problem. I was convinced that I was close to
a breakthrough. (I wasn’t.) Papers were everywhere,
intermingled with the remnants of far too many 10¢
Taco Tuesday wrappers.
A good friend stopped by to bring better food, lend
a mathematical hand, and put an end to my solitary
madness. She listened carefully while I jumped across
the room grabbing papers and incoherently babbling
about my “breakthrough.”
Then she somberly grabbed a pen and wrote out the
flaw that I had missed, obliterating the proof.

I was stunned and heartbroken. She
looked up and said, “But this is great,
because what you’ve done here is de-
fine the problem more concretely.” She
continued with a simple truth that I
have carried with me ever since:
And so, dear reader, this is where I
would like to begin. This article looks
at the problems inherent in building
a more decentralized Internet. Au-
dacious? Yes, but this has become a
renewed focus in recent years, even
by the father of the Web himself (see
Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project4).
Several companies and open source
projects are now focusing on differ-
ent aspects of the “content-delivery”