A talk prepared for the celebration of 60 years of computer science and AI at the University of Edinburgh. Building on foundational research on packet switching from the early 1960s, the ARPANET came to life in 1969. The central ideas and first implementations of the Internet followed soon afterwards, although it was another couple of decades before the World Wide Web made the Internet accessible to a broad community of users. Today, the Internet continues to be an amazingly successful distributed system, but the organisation of services is increasingly centralised. From the perspective of many users, the Internet consists of a handful of massive, logically centralised services such as Google, Netflix, and the major social networks. This is a source of concern for those of us who have worked on Internet technology since the early days, because decentralisation was a core tenet of the Internet’s design philosophy.