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During the summer of 2000, with under-cooked dot.coms littering the landscape, a new Internet model appeared. It revolved around peer-to-peer (P2P) networking.
This definitive second generation of the internet takes bored users well beyond the crass mail order catalogue model of the world-wide web. In fact, P2P is fundamental to the architecture of the Internet.
P2P for the masses caught the public's attention with several minor web shocks starting last spring. Web developers had bolted together established (and non-patented) technologies that achieved widespread social impact. First, Scour (then its weaker cousin Napster) caused bandwidth heartburn for campus system administrators. Then Navan Man Ian Clarke set Freenet into the wild where it and Gnutella serve up shared files. The founders of the Jabber chat service declared that XML was more than a tool for B2B transaction processing -- it could structure information chosen by ordinary users. Shortly after that, Microsoft bet its mouse on the .NET initiative,
in which Web clients and servers divide jobs among themselves.
A common thread weaves its way through all these developments. It's a thread that binds together a new world of sporadically connected Internet nodes. It links laptops, handhelds, and mobile phones. And it extends into household devices.
Its basic premise -- to return content, choice, and control to ordinary users. Tiny end points on the Internet -- often unknowingly -- exchange information and form communities. There are no more clients and servers because the servers discreetly retract. In this second generation of the
Internet, significant communication takes place between cooperating peers. The new Internet is P2P and it marks the end of the read-only Web. It steers the Internet away from TV and back to where you can participate as an active user.
Clay Shirky, a partner at The Accelerator Group, points out that peer-to-peer exploits the "dark matter of the Internet. Just like interstellar space contains huge amounts of inert dust that we can't track or measure -- but that may be forming galaxies all the time -- personal computers offer enormous amounts of cycles consumed by busy waits, along with disk space waiting to be filled and communication lines that lie idle." P2P creates constellations of cooperating users out of these wasted resources. As Mr. Shirky writes in Business 2.0, "With peer-to-peer, the computer is no longer just a life-support system for your browser."
In his Spring 2000 comments to Trinity's Netsoc in Dublin, Eric S. Raymond articulated why the P2P movement started to gel. "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." That was certainly the case with Jabber. Jeremie Miller, the founder of the Jabber.org project, got bothered using several applications to stay in
touch with friends on different instant messaging (IM)systems. So he built a cross-platform, open source IM system that would speak to all the other messaging systems.
P2P rebadges one of the oldest models in the world of communications. Telephones are P2P, as are Fidonet and the old-style UUCP implementation of Usenet. IP routing, the basis of the Internet, is P2P, although company firewall policies and internet service providers try to prevent direct P2P connections. Until the end of the 20th century, every Internet-connected system hosted both servers and clients. Aside from dial-up users, the second-class status of today's PC browser set didn't exist. Portions of company network architecture must decentralise, and accommodate P2P
connections for new devices, because many of the billion mobile phones in the world are going to try to access e-mail and Interact via modem links to company resources.
Many worry that an enthusiastic uptake of P2P will cause unnecessary processing and Internet traffic. If you believe this, then you cannot use Napster in evidence, because exchanging large files would stress networks regardless of the technology used to administer the transaction. Most
expert observers believe P2P conserves bandwidth when used appropriately.
Intel used P2P concepts when analysing the crippling effect of users downloading training videos. Intel software lets files relocate near groups of systems that request them. Comparable to caching by Internet hubs or multicasting, this technique results in using regular, underutilized computers instead of specialized, expensive file servers. The model of shifting content to where it's wanted is also the basis of Freenet.
P2P brings people together. P2P builds self-organising communities from inside-out, instead of from top-down as in the outdated portal model. Jabber, by providing chatters with an easy way to categorize their content, helps them organise themselves. Weblogs, Wiki, and Meerkat let people
follow and comment on the goings-on of other people who interest them. Even a passive sharing of resources, like Popular Power or SETI@Home, makes people feel good because they like being part of something big and diverse.
If your job depends on making the most of your Internet connectivity, you should examine which P2P technologies would make you more productive. You can start by reading the hyperlinks from http://www.topgold.com/connect/
and by reading O'Reilly's Peer-to-Peer, on Irish bookshelves Europe in February 2001.
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