> How is it more efficient for my signals to go a thousand miles away and back just to talk to my neighbor across the street?
For that, your neighbor would have to run their own infrastructure, keep it updated, moderated against spam, hackers and whatnotelse. And most people don't have the resources to do that - time, money or a DSL uplink with at least something halfway decent upstream bandwidth.
> I've often thought, the web isn't designed for efficiency, it's designed for scale.
Not intentionally designed. But the economies of scale always win in the end - agriculture, manufacturing, even education. As a conglomerate, the Internet as a sum of actors has always converged to see inefficiencies as damage - and route and work around them.
For that, your neighbor would have to run their own infrastructure, keep it updated, moderated against spam, hackers and whatnotelse. And most people don't have the resources to do that - time, money or a DSL uplink with at least something halfway decent upstream bandwidth.
> I've often thought, the web isn't designed for efficiency, it's designed for scale.
Not intentionally designed. But the economies of scale always win in the end - agriculture, manufacturing, even education. As a conglomerate, the Internet as a sum of actors has always converged to see inefficiencies as damage - and route and work around them.