edgepolitics

The term P2P already carries significant baggage in many people’s minds, as it is often associated with the illegal sharing of MP3 music files, software and movies on the Internet. However, the term in its usual Internet context in fact only means ‘peer-to-peer’ and the definition of a ‘peer’ is non-specific. In fact, P2P means many different things to different people.

Communication applications like email and ‘Instant Messaging’ (IM) are sometimes referred to as P2P or being closely related, because they are ‘user-to-user’ services. To make matters more confusing, the Banking and Finance industries use the term P2P to indicate ‘person-to-person’ financial transactions like those made through ‘Western Union’, and more recently, the internet payment service PayPal has been designated by the Banks as falling into this category. So when mainstream media or file-sharers and ‘geeks’ refer to P2P, they are talking about ‘network and device functionality’, but when Banks talk about ‘P2P’ they are talking about ‘people transferring money to each other, outside of the Banking system’.

All of the definitions indicate an increasing orientation toward a kind of ‘one-to-one’ connectivity rather than the one-to-many model of traditional media, ‘broadcast-television’ or the client/server paradigm of the WWW. The P2P meme also has a societal meaning in that it implies a cooperative approach to social-networking and commercial activity demonstrated in new forms of group-association and collective publishing on the internet. The ‘Wiki’ and the ‘Open-Source-Software’ movement being good examples of this broad trend. Michel Bauwens, in his work, ‘P2P and Human Evolution’ defines P2P as: “a form of human network-based organisation which rests upon the free participation of equipotent partners” This, could be called the ‘many-to-many’ movement, because it is one-to-one, on a mass scale.

The social phenomenon of P2P usage that is gaining strength on the internet, is a kind of pluralistic global super-community with a theoretically unlimited number of widely dispersed users. To join this community is to subscribe to a system of shared resources and distributed ownership, where all users contribute their own capital resource, their computer and processing power, to the open community. For internet users, being part of this new phenomenon is an innately communal and social process.

The thing that is often overlooked is that some of the biggest successes on the web, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook for instance, are facilitating aspects of the many-to-many/peer-to-peer movement, but doing so within the constraints of the client-server system of the web. This produces a weird kind of asymmetry. The users are creating the content, and the web vendors are trying to keep the genie in the bottle. Its all about control… When users are finally given the keys to the toy cupboard, I don’t think they will want to give them back.

Before the WWW, the internet operated essentially like an imperfect decentralized P2P network with early University-based computers, making direct connections between US campuses. Around 1990 the DNS/WWW paradigm began to be over-laid on top of this network. This enabled the advent of the browser and name-paths to file-servers on which were placed the ‘web page’ interface whereupon wide spread adoption began. Web, E-mail and Database servers became ‘server-farms’ and eventually ‘server-clouds’ as the system was scaled-up to cope with exploding demand.

However, as demand went through the roof, no amount of money could guarantee QOS, as even the biggest systems on the planet with thousands of interlinked servers, routinely failed. All the while people got used to the notion that the normal web-user was by default, a ‘receiver’ or buyer of information in the equation, and not normally a seller or ‘provider’.

However, applications where users could interact directly with each other (Hotmail, ICQ, Messenger) and publish and sell to each other (Blogging, E-Bay) became among the most popular applications on the web. As the inter-linked server/client networks grew to unprecedented proportions, spam, e-mail-borne-viruses, trojan-horses, identity-spoofing, ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks, ‘phishing’ and identity-theft became uncontrollable and started choking and attacking the very fabric of the web. By March 2004 60% of all email traffic was illegal ‘unsolicited email’ from strangers (SPAM).

I get a lot of spam, probably as much as anybody in the room. My e-mail address is well-known… The Hotmail® servers that we run, which are the free and subscription e-mail capabilities we offer, today over half of what goes through there is actually mail that’s spam that people are not interested in receiving.

- Bill Gates (quote taken from the Microsoft website)

So, Hotmail is effectively a giant spam-machine, and even Bill Gates both suffers from the problem and cannot solve it. Products like Qurb, Esafe, MX Tunnel and MailFrontier-Gateway add yet more levels of complexity and/or servers onto the internet to try and block spam, effectively passing on the problem, but not dealing with the cause. The WWW client/server paradigm has achieved massive scale and overwhelming success, producing countless valuable services, but there are now notable flaws and vulnerabilities in the model. In the mean time, P2P file-sharing has become an unstoppable phenomenon, with unprecedented levels of adoption.

On these new systems, people experienced constant availability of a truly massive amount of shared digital content and these tens of millions of people began illegally exchanging hundreds of millions of music, software and video files, with total strangers. The web had become a giant impersonal shopping mall littered with illegal activity, where users were largely disconnected and insulated from the impact that one user can have on another. In this unregulated playground there is an intangible (although sometimes very real) cost involved in flouting copyright law. Some negative effects of file-sharing are as follows:

• The user runs a risk of litigation or closure of their service due to litigation.
• ‘Free riders’ people who download files but do not contribute files to the network
• People with slow connections slow down performance of file exchange
• Poisoning of the network with corrupted files to discourage users.
• Customer churn (and thereby peer un-availability) can cause inconsistent service
• Receiving incorrect-files or viruses in files via anonymous file exchange
• Exposure to highly illegal material mixed in with typical music and video file lists.

Already more than 12,000 file-sharers have been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Some record companies have been accused of poisoning P2P networks with bogus files to discourage users, and in 2002 a company called OVERPEER released a product that floods P2P networks with fake files in an attempt to stop the trading of “unauthorized” mp3s.

Since Napster, peer-to-peer applications have been evolving steadily and in diverse ways, with new forms appearing as varying hybrids of web and pure-network technologies. The DNS and client/server systems have provided P2P applications with easy access to the web’s 600+ million user-base, and thereby, to an unprecedented forum from which to usurp and deal in almost any kind of digital-file. (whether previously sold on the web or not) However it has been the resulting law-suits targeted at applications with server-based file-lists and the quest for user-anonymity to protect against the current wave of litigation against individual users, that have been the main drivers of product innovation, back toward forms of decentralization for many new P2P systems. The illicit nature of user-activity with these applications have in many ways interfered with their unfettered commercial growth, creating no clear market-leader, an over-supply of vendors and a fragmentation (and to some degree) a stigmatizing of the user-base.

At the same time, some of the most successful legal new P2P based variants like Skype, and a new crowd of ‘legal’ music sharing applications, like Weedshare, Bitmunk and PeerImpact still use servers (and WWW infrastructure) to perform functions like coordinating and locating peers. BitTorrent and variants like Supranova and Lokitorrent, (which recently closed their service due to legal pressure) also require centralized web-based ‘trackers’ (a form of server which co-ordinates the transfer of metadata across a BitTorrent network) to function effectively.

Although new technical innovations in P2P have often been driven by the need to avoid prosecution for illegal file-sharing, web protocols have still been very ‘sticky’ for developers due to the various levels of functional assistance they provide, so there has been reluctance by commercial developers to explore and develop pure forms of P2P. For all the web’s vulnerabilities to attack and corruption, there is considerable ‘lock-in’ to WWW legacy systems, with the marketplace in general having built up a history of relative trust and tolerance and familiarity with it’s flawed processes.

Down in Miami Beach today (Wednesday 30th Nov. 2005) on a street corner, in front of the Bass Museum on 2121 Park Avenue (between 21st and 22nd Streets), there is a ‘happening’ taking place.

Its called “The Digital Street Corner.” Its ‘Performance Art’ meets the ‘Virtual World’. Why is this interesting? Because, although the technology is young and somewhat beta-ish, it is quite likely an indicator of a major new trend.

It is Solipsis, an open source project designed to enable an infinitely scalable global network. It does not use DNS, It does not use servers. It is in fact a fully decentralized P2P network, or what is known as ‘Pure P2P’.

They call it a ‘Metaverse’ or ‘virtual public territory.’ Relying on its own protocols, Solipsis can potentially be inhabited by an unlimited number of participants, and, take note blogosphere… this network also enables personal blogging! (although currently fairly rudimentary)

The concept of a Metaverse is not so new, it’s a term that was coined in Neal Stephenson’s groundbreaking novel “Snow Crash” and is not dissimilar to the central idea in the Wachowski brother’s Matrix trilogy. Projects like San Francisco based Linden Lab’s ‘Second Life’ and ‘There’ which was spun-off from San Mateo CF based Forterra Systems, fall into the ‘Metaverse’ category. What makes Silopsis different is, not only that it is totally ‘communications’ orientated, but that it was sponsored and funded by a telecommunications company, France Telecom; and that single fact makes this project quite fascinating.

The name Solipsis, is taken from the word ‘solipsism’ which means: “the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist” (hmmm… deep!) This is a not too oblique pointer to the open-source politics behind the venture. Its about empowering the individual, and getting right down to the granular end-user level, and on the Internet you can’t really go down much further than that.

Designed by Joaquin Keller and Gwendal Simon at France Télécom Research and Development Labs, Silopsis has been billed as a “free and open source system for a massively multi-participant shared virtual world.” Quoting directly from the France telecom web site:

“Solipsis is a public virtual territory. The world is initially empty and only users will fill it by creating and running entities. No pre-existing cities, habitants nor scenario to respect… Solipsis is open-source, so everybody can enhance the protocols and the algorithms. Moreover, the system architecture clearly separates the different tasks, so that peer-to-peer hackers as well as multimedia geeks can find a good place to have fun here!”

“The Solipsis program is designed in various layers. Each user first runs a program that connects him or her to the virtual world. This initial program also gives him or her a position in the virtual world. A second program or navigator then lets the user move around and interact with neighbours, since communication is the reason for which the Solipsis system was created. The navigator allows the 2D graphic representation of the user’s avatar, neighbourhood and neighbouring avatars.”

“It also contains a chat room interface for communicating with them, and a favourites system to mark favourite places. It can also warn the user when he or she moves close to a peer with the characteristics he or she is looking for.”

Note: BTW, don’t expect the Ritz… I don’t think it traverses firewalls too well. I have been using it for a couple of weeks and have yet to work out how to find another human being on the network, virtual or not. However, it did make me quite excited; because I know what it represents.

Instructions go to:

http://solipsis.netofpeers.net/wiki2/index.php/Happening_Download

Happening starts:

EST, GMT-5, Miami Beach: 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM November 30th, 2005

“The Digital Street Corner”

go to: http://www.fredforest.com

Main Solipsis page:

http://solipsis.netofpeers.net/wiki2/index.ph/Main_Page

Doc Searls says:

If all of the Internet’s value is at its edges, Internet connectivity itself wants to become a commodity.

Geoffrey Moore says “What is core becomes context”. Like the approx. 3 billion MP3s being shared around the world every month on file-sharing networks. Although the recording industry would hate to admit it, pop-music has become or is rapidly moving to the final stage of commoditization.

Music is becoming valueless and ubiquitous… it has become Moore’s ‘context’. If anyone doesn’t seriously think the iPod’s major driver is not those 3 billion files, then they haven’t realised that the value has shifted from the music to the device, and the best source for filling that device is not CD’s and not even iTunes, (that’s a sugar-pill for the record companies, to make them think they are solving the problem… - they are not.) The best source is applications like eDonkey with its 299 million downloads in 2003 alone. P2P activity now accounts for 50 to 70% of all Internet traffic. In Asia, P2P data-traffic on the Internet now averages more than 10 times that of ‘http’ web traffic.[cachelogic]

The future is happening, and its not really a web phenomenon, or shall we say in the future it wont be seen as being a Web movement taxonomically, its a ‘Pure Internet’ thing, and guess where this is going… The ‘service ownership’ of typical PC based email applications like Outlook Express is not actually owned by the consumer but by ISP’s, and effectively rented to the consumer on a monthly basis. In the case of Web Mail providers like Hotmail or Yahoo, the service is given away for free to the user in exchange for personal information designed to push targeted banner advertisements inside the mail applications. However, Hotmail and Yahoo continue to ‘own’ the service.

Even Internet Domain-Names are never truly owned by the consumer, but rented from US Government sanctioned agencies and commercial monopolies like Verisign and ICANN. Connectivity is big business Baby! But… the Big Business grasp on it won’t last forever. Albert Benschop, from the University of Amsterdam frames it well: “Over the years the internet has become nearly just as stratified as the society it stems from. The exponential growth and far-reaching commercialization of the web have lead to an ever-stronger manifestation of the power structures of society in the virtual world. At present specialized computers channel the data traffic on the Internet and portals and search machines such as AOL, Google and Yahoo! dominate and exploit the market of the internet-dollars. Strongly concentrated hubs have arisen that play a crucial role in the Internet traffic. They are monster-servers, diverting their information to millions of regular web-users.”

Watch out… because as Geoffrey Moore says, “What is core becomes context”.