P2P and the promise of internet equality

Abstract

Technologies often come wrapped in stories about politics. These stories may not explain the motives of the technologists, but they do often explain the social energy that propels the technology into the larger world. In the case of P2P technologies, the official engineering story is that computational effort should be distributed to reflect the structure of the problem. But the engineering story does not explain the strong feelings P2P computing often evokes. The strong feelings derive from a political story, often heatedly disavowed by technologists but widespread in the culture: P2P delivers on the Internet's promise of decentralization. By minimizing the role of centralized computing elements, the story goes, P2P systems will be immune to censorship, monopoly, regulation, and other exercises of centralized authority.