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.