Yes, I agree.

It appears GNU Taler is seeing some initial deployments. That’s for payment system.

An index can have centralized control, while being itself decentralized. Like for checking certificates you don’t contact some CA website every time, you have a certificate chain, cryptographically verified. That’s for CSAM and DMCA notices. That center can deal with them, sending deletion notices signed with their certificate or whatever, or recalling index entries. Those would have to propagate over the network fast enough, of course.

That system just has to allow plugging in paid services in a uniform way. Then the serious money part will not be as important.

With torrents one can have sequential downloads, and again, with paid services one could have those having new publications faster and with better download speeds.

The word “uniform” is the only thing differentiating this from the Internet we already have.