Great qustion, @toddrjohnson.

I don't think China will ever allow a decentralized internet. Not in our lifetime. It's possible, however, in the free world, at least, to have a segment of the internet decentralized. If you're old enough to remember AOL, they were among the first services to pull a part of the world wide web down out of the cloud and onto their own servers, creating a sort of walled garden within their own domain. This happened long before anyone had heard of Facebook. With a growing dapps ecosystem on Ethereum, EOS, and, yes, even Steem (the three blockchains with the highest number of dapps), I think we'll see a time when most of the Internet's activity will take place on decentralized applications. Already, mobile accounts for almost half of global Internet traffic, and over 80% of that is done on apps throughout most of the world. Windows 10 is almost completely app-based (even the Control Panel is an app within the operating system). Computing, in the next five years, will likely almost all be app-based. The next step in the evolutionary process will be decentralized apps. But I don't think centralization will disappear entirely. I'm not that naive.