Going Viral: The Future of Peer-to-Peer Technology

-- By MattSavoff - 21 Oct 2014

Most of our generation cannot remember life without peer-to-peer ("P2P") file sharing. This file sharing ranges from programs such as BitTorrent, Limewire, and Kazaa all the way back to the likes of eDonkey and Napster before the turn of the century. While the P2P? file sharing technology has changed and evolved since the days of Napster, the initial premise has remained the same: allow users to share and access media files such as music, movies, books, and video games free of charge. Stemming from the proliferating digitalization of physical media coupled with the increase in number and capabilities of personal computers, P2P? file sharing has exploded in the past 15 years. But what is the true impact on this growing phenomenon? While the music and film industries report significant losses in revenue due to "internet piracy", Yochai Benkler claims in The Wealth of Networks that P2P? file sharing is economically efficient and that users pay the full transaction cost and marginal cost of such sharing.

The Current State

Marco Montemagno, and Italian media communication expert and entrepreneur wrote a P2P? manifesto which focused on the central tenet that P2P? file sharing is "unstoppable, useful, effective and a major disruptive technology able to breach into the oligarchy of established media business". Montemagno argues that P2P? file sharing is revolutionary and a technically unstoppable technology. And while media companies show nothing but disdain for such technology, P2P? file sharing presents positive elements for everyone: companies, the market, and of course the users. The advent of programs such as BitTorrent create the most efficient form of content delivery and distribution which in turn makes P2P? networks the future frontier for publishing and content distribution. According to CacheLogic? , a British web analysis firm, BitTorrent accounts for over 35% of all the traffic on the internet. P2P? traffic significantly outweighs web traffic and continues to grow each day. While the media industry continues to fight against P2P? technology, it is fighting a losing battle. We have seen programs come and go (Napster, Kazaa, Limewire to name a few) and more continue to not only rise, but grow larger than its predecessor. Thanks to P2P? technology, anyone can step into the media industry, produce music and/or videos, and become profitable all while using P2P? technology as the vehicle to publicize their work. This has never been seen before and provides some insight as to the value of P2P? technology.

Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Benefits the Market

Saying that P2P? file sharing actually benefits the market may seem counter-intuitive, but the reasoning is simple. P2P? technology eliminates scarcity. Scarcity of media sources, content, and delivery channels. This technology gives the user an unprecedented freedom of choice. This scarcity is the very foundation on which the media industry was built. Scarcity caused primarily by copyright. As a consumer I can say that we hate scarcity. Monopolists on the other hand love scarcity. Scarcity once allowed companies to charge a "take it or leave it" price, which they can no longer do because with countless outlets available for consumers, we can "leave it". It is the leaders of this world who exert so much effort to prevent change and maintain business as usual. Unfortunately for them, change is inevitable and smart content producers today understand the new era. They adapt and search for new opportunities and business models to fit this new environment. P2P? technology has opened the door for many new business scenarios which have non-infringing use; Skype is a leading example of this. This new system also allows for a more widespread distribution of niche content for those who have trouble finding such content through traditional means.

Peer-to-Peer Effects on the Companies and Users

Rising P2P? networks even provide new opportunities for media companies by offering unprecedented distribution and delivery channels. P2P? networks offer "to any online company a direct, permanent, unmediated, highly efficient communication channel with their customers" (Montemagno). By the very nature of P2P? networks, every individual who is a customer of any of these online entities also becomes a marketing agent for that company, thus creating an endless loop of viral marketing. This is the very reason that Linux now offers many of its distributions (such as Knoppix) via P2P? . Otherwise these companies' costs would skyrocket by having to use CDs and the large amounts of software data they would have to provide the consumer. This is but one example demonstrating how P2P? technology allows companies to save resources while also increasing efficiency of distribution.

P2P? is, of course, good for the users. This extends far beyond the sharing of music and movies for people to download illegally. Sharing is the way of the future and the most innovative projects work around the idea of sharing. This ranges from sharing pictures (Flickr, Imgur, Facebook) to sharing of friends (Facebook), business contacts (LinkedIn? ), job contacts (Monster), and audio sharing (Skype, Ventrilo). P2P? technology allows any given user to transform into his or her own media center. As mentioned earlier, any person can now create music, movies, tv shows, or anything of the sort and distribute it anywhere right from their computer. As Montemagno states, "sharing is an attractive activity because it gives the P2P? users autonomy and freedom. Autonomy to decide what to share with others. Freedom to do it". While traditionally P2P? file sharing has been used for music and movies, this is only the early and spontaneous use; the applications of such a technology are endless.

The draft is neither technically correct nor solid in its economic analysis. In the first place, "peer to peer file sharing" is simply "the Internet protocol." In the net as designed, all systems are peers, and file sharing of any kind is peer-to-peer sharing. The Web, a layer-seven (or application layer) phenomenon, four and five layers above the fundamental peering structure of the net's link and file transmission layers, uses a server-client paradigm, or can use one, in which a client (often a program called a browser) interacts assymmetrically with a program that only serves files, without very often receiving any. (This paradigm does not well describe the more fully-implemented Web we now have.)

The division at layer seven into file-providers and file-servers tends always to "degenerate" or "improve" (depending on your point of view) into peerage again, in various different ways. As more people run web servers, "users" (however their machines or devices are clustered) tend to become peers. The net democratizes. Capitalism is generally unfavorably impressed, because assymmetry implies power over consumers, which is what capitalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is all about. All of this is pretty thoroughly laid out my the "Freedom and the Cloud" lecture, about the social effects of which you can read in Jim Dwyer's new book, "More Awesome Than Money".

Special-purpose webservers, like Napster, developed to help people search one another's web severs for particular kinds of files, such as music or video files. These are simply better than browsers for performing particular kinds of activities in the net. To call them "peer to peer" activities should be tautological, except that certain profit-making entities (some of whom made "software," and some of whom made "media," but all of whom wanted to prevent zero-marginal-cost goods from being priced at marginal cost, which meant they wanted to create legal and technical forces to break the market) tried to make people believe that net wasn't naturally made of peers, and that file sharing, which is the purpose of the net, was not its purpose.

The efficiencies discussed by Benkler and others have to do with bandwidth costs and the other frictions in sharing. If a file is served by one server only, the operator of that server must pay for all the bandwidth used to move the goods, because the operator must itself buy enough bandwidth to handle all demand for the product. If the parties receiving the file can re-serve it, however, their upstream bandwidth is additively aggregated, and the total available serving bandwidth is greater than any supplier can or wants to buy. BitTorrent is simply a transport protocol that automates this bandwidth aggregation. It creates a "swarm" of parties who want a copy of the same file, which is broken into pieces so that parties who have only partial copies of the file can share the parts they have as they download more parts. For large files, this process, which does for bandwidth what Benkler factually states (not claims) is overwhelmingly efficient. Contrary to your supposition, the use of BitTorrent to distribute media files is very small compared to its use in distributing software. For large aggregations of software, like entire operating environments, an OS plus tens of thousands of application programs and libraries, BitTorrent is optimal, and the free software ecology, which invented it, uses it for orders of magnitude more material than all the Hollywood movies that have ever existed.

So none of what you are writing about has to do with "peer to peer," or at least in the way you suggest. You are actually writing about sharing culture rather than consuming culture. You might want to write about network cost effects of different modes of file transmission in the net. You might want to write about cultural sharing as opposed to consuming. You might want to write about freedom in the cloud. The way to make the draft better is to decide which subject you are writing about, and then to discuss it unconfused with the others. Perhaps the best place to start would be with the one sentence conveying as succinctly and forcibly as possible the idea of your own that you want the reader to take away. Put that at the top of the draft. Develop that idea from its roots, show how and why predictable objections are mistaken, and give the reader some implications she can take away and further develop on her own. If I might add one more suggestion, in using technological metaphors or network jargon, be sure you understand clearly and completely the technology your vocabulary denotes.

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