I skimmed the book on "the protocol". Since our favorite abbreviations litter the place (HTTP, RFC, etc.) and they regard only the network protocols I can only assume the man wants to make a statement about how code, too, has human flaws. And about how the networking protocols are took our freedom to do as we please locally and have no federation. Truly I do agree, networking sucks at this moment. Claiming it to be distributed is simply experiencing reality wrong. Part of it is technology that is capable of supporting distributed solutions, in practice implemented by single organizations. At best you can claim "The Internet" is a decentralized, not distributed, organization. Controlling the protocol itself is a huge problem. Bitcoin solves it rather roughly. Torrents do a *lot* better imho. Solutions can be stable protocols with protocols on top of it. That requires "perfect" protocols though. That's kinda hard.