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P2P Shifts Focus Away from Portals
Thursday, November 09 2000
by Bernie Goldbach


You can't slag off Peer-to-Peer (P2P) as some pirate-to-pirate aberration. 

P2P applications make money for companies who use them for instant messaging,
workgroups, and distributed computing. They are more difficult to block at
company firewalls than incoming e-mail viruses. They have shifted the focus of
Internet computing away from central portals.



System administrators know they can't effectively block P2P networking. In an
environment of constantly changing software, technical blocks are just temporary
solutions. As the cross-talk on slashdot.org shows, Napster addicts have
developed an alternative market of extremely smart software 

already. The generation beyond Napster includes services that won't be stopped by
technical means. MP3 files will always be shared across the Internet.



Prior to the dot.com shakeout, predictable patterns of usage appeared on the
Internet. Retail vendors used the Web as a mail order channel. Entertainment
firms used it to promote signed bands. Portals and search engines needed Internet
space to flog banner ads. But the average user 

revealed startling patterns. Average Internet users push and pull more megabytes
of e-mail and files, more than they view web pages.



The P2P technologies are not new. However, millions of people hae realised for
the first time that they could do more than passively browse the Internet.The new
P2P technologies do not need clients and servers. Instead, the 

significant communication takes place between cooperating peers. So, with
millions of dollars showered on portals around the world, the model left standing
is P2P.



In late summer 2000, P2P technology started evolving faster as key leaders
started talking intensively to each other. This resulted in better functionality
as well as building a positive public image for P2P. The main P2P architects
include aggressively innovative technologists from major 

companies, visionary heads of startups, journalists, and leaders of experimental
academic projects. Most share a common philosophy they are incensed over the
threat of software patents.



What happens to Internet traffic if P2P continues to gain more users? Although
performance concerns many observers, the experts expect P2P to actually conserve
bandwidth when used appropriately.



Effective P2P challenges the architecture of current Internet services. P2P
redefines the assumptions behind next year's Irish roll-out of asymmetric service
(like ADSL and cable modems). Michael Tiemann, CTO of Red Hat, goes 

so far as to say, "Peer-to-peer may be the critical enabling technology that
makes broadband possible."  P2P allows for people interested in a topic to
create their own language for talking about it. While different communities may
all share an underlying infrastructure, like Jabber's chat service or Gnutella
file sharing, the structure of the users' data can emerge directly from the
users.



Metadata, which describes each file and the elements within it, sets up the
process. Standards committees can flush out schemas that help make P2P work. Rael
Dornfest, creator of the Meerkat service for the O'Reilly Network, repeatedly
points out that a good metadata adds logarithmically to 

the value and uses of the data it describes.



Invisible Worlds promotes a generalised approach to mapping data for users. It
proposes the Simple Exchange Protocol, currently an Internet Draft. The white
papers at invisible.net provide compelling reasons for services to 

expose their data schemas and publish open Application Programming Interfaces to
their services.



Once you adopt the P2P mindset, you invariably start deploring attempts to shut
off innovation through bans on deep linking and you begin to resent restrictions
on the amount of data one user can retrieve.



As P2P continues evolving, the community has to colloborate. Each peer can
produce as well as consume information. As the Internet has shown, producers are
relatively few. On Usernet News, the ratio of posters to 

total readers is less than 7 percent. No more than 10 percent of Irish mailing
list members ever contribute to electronic shoptalk. But that ratio keeps the
system moving. Even low participation by diverse members creates vibrant,
self-organising communities.



P2P facilitates the process of collaboration. It doesn't work well for handling
rapidly changing data. It does reward large communities whose members know what
they want before they start searching.



And it draws from an alternative strength: the strength of connecting people. If
you're connected to a P2P network that includes knowledgeable members, you're
part of the second generation of the Internet whose usage patterns have already
circumvented the outdated portal model of the 90s.