At the moment, the best-known example of a new frontier in Internet technology has been dogged by legal woes, and looks like it effectively will be put out of business - at least in its existing form - in short order.
But peer-to-peer (P2P) computing, the powerful concept behind the hugely popular but embattled music file-sharing program Napster, looks as if it has an extremely rosy future - at least, if the legal teams don't halt development of the many nascent projects that fall under the broad P2P heading. And at the moment, judging by the packed-out, first-ever conference on P2P in San Francisco last week, the projects and young companies are numerous, energetic and, in many cases, aiming squarely at the corporate market, and investors are thick on the ground.
The conference, sponsored by technology publisher O'Reilly and Associates, drew some 1,000 participants and was a defiant gesture towards the Ninth Circuit Court that, ironically, handed down a crushing judgment against Napster just two days earlier and only streets away. Napster, apparently wary of legal problems, declined to send anyone to the conference. But it hardly seemed to matter, and, indeed, the company, which has in under two years gained a phenomenal 50 million users of its software, served more as an example of the technological - and for some, cultural and social - potential of P2P, and also its threat.
Perhaps not since the first web browsers opened up the Internet to a broad public has there been a technology that promises to so profoundly change the way people use computers. It offers buying, selling, communicating, collaborating, even structuring the Net itself and, ultimately, challenges patent, copyright and intellectual property law. "Peer-to-peer is empowering a whole set of users on the Internet who heretofore were being Balkanised. It's really giving users of the Internet control over information and resources," said Mr Robert Young, co-founder and chairman of Linux software company Red Hat. "What Napster showed us . . . is the shape of the next-generation Internet," said publisher and conference organiser Mr Tim O'Reilly. Why is P2P seen by its proponents as socially and technologically revolutionary? Since the arrival of the Web, the PC has been little more than a mute appendage far out on the edges of the Net, a passive receiver of digital content stored in big, centralised computers. Even email is not a direct link to another individual, but requires the sender to go through a centralised digital post office - the sender asks a server to take the message and ship it over the network, then the recipient asks a server to deliver it. But P2P makes every computer a broadcaster of content as well as a receiver, an autonomous source of whatever information and resources the computer user cares to share.
According to Mr Clay Shirky, a writer, analyst and keynote speaker at the conference, PCs constitute a "veil of secondclass connectivity" on the Internet. The veil hides a wealth of real computing resources that P2P can place at the disposal of the PC user - aggregated together, the computers currently on the Net represent at least 10 billion megahertz of power and 10,000 terabytes of storage, Mr Shirky said. He sees P2P as "communitarian" - literally giving power to the people - and asks, "How far can we go towards distributing power to the edges of the network?"
Many argue that P2P is not a new-fangled distortion of how the Net should operate. With P2P, "the Internet is being used in the ways that it was intended," argued conference speaker Mr Ian Clarke, the youthful Irish inventor of popular P2P software program Freenet, which links users into a giant, anonymous web. "With peer-to-peer, we actually have a phrase to describe something that [the Internet pioneers] took for granted."
Whatever the Net's originators intended, peer-to-peer applications have already caught both the public's and the business world's eyes, in most cases surreptitiously. For example, instant messaging is considered the first real peer-to-peer application, because it opens and holds a direct link to an individual user, unlike e-mail. Napster has spawned or given visibility to several similar programs, such as Gnutella and Freenet, which also allow users to directly exchange files or chat.
More exotically, SETI@home, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence organisation, has pooled the unused processor power of home computers through a popular screensaver program that crunches through radio data received from space. Some companies, including P2P start-up Entropia and veteran Internet service provider Juno, believe they can sell such "spare" processor time from home users to corporates that need supercomputing power on a budget.
Other companies attending the conference believe they can bring P2P to the workplace with applications that allow groups to collaborate on projects with realtime updates; form meeting groups or develop software, using chat; or pool the processing power of separate PCs on company networks. Some of the technology world's biggest players have also rowed in behind P2P. Chief Sun scientist Mr Bill Joy announced that Sun would introduce a P2P development platform called JXTA (for juxtaposition). Intel and Microsoft say they will create an opensource library for creating P2P applications.
But for P2P to penetrate the business world, developers will need to understand the corporate mindset, cautioned Mr Ray Ozzie, inventor of software program Lotus Notes and founder of another P2P pioneer, Groove Networks. The corporate world fears that P2P applications "have no respect for intellectual property", are "bandwidth hogs" and could allow viruses to pass corporate firewalls. Businesses must believe P2P programs will bring no harm and either "alleviate pain" or provide an opportunity or competitive edge, he said.
However, some fear that neither the technological nor business models for P2P may succeed, for reasons illustrated by Napster's woes. "The courts are ratifying the ability of [the entertainment industry] to regulate cyberspace now, before we even know what it's going to look like," lamented Stanford law professor Mr Lawrence Lessig, in a keynote that voiced strong support for Napster. "We need the period of experimentation. Give me 10 years before we get to that conclusion, but don't restrict the innovation now," he told the conference. Others are more optimistic. Mr Shirky believes computer users will demonstrate an online form of mass civil disobedience and continue to use P2P programs to share files, but within limits. "I think we will find equilibrium," he said. "A set of limits, in which people can live while respecting content, is coming."
Ultimately, Mr Shirky believes P2P's real promise is the creation of a single, global computer, formed by hundreds of millions of computers and devices linked over the Internet. "[IBM founder] Thomas Watson predicted that the world would not ever need more than five computers," he said. "We now know he overestimated that by four."
