Discussing P2P

A few notes from the P2P Discussion with Ray Ozzie (Groove), Ian Clark (Freenet), Johnny Deep (AIMster), and Gene Kan (Gnutella). Clay Shirky, moderator.

Ray Ozzie: The Internet is fundamentally broken because of NATs and firewalls. It will break again because of the limitations of centralized DNS. With Groove, we looked at, what underpinnings do we have to build to get to the point where mere humans can treat it as a symmetric network?

Ian Clarke: Our intent was to provide anonymity and privacy for people who wanted to both consume and provide information on the Internet. If you have any form of central server, for our goals, it was essential to create a compeletely decentralized service. This is difficult; there are issues of scalability, efficiency, balancing bandwidth contribution (some users have modems, some have broadband). We've taken a very different approach than Gnutella. The most surprising thing to an original developer (if one was transported from the 1960s to the present day) would be that we have a phrase to describe something they took for granted.

Ozzie: There are big technical differences between the enterprise and consumers. Enterprise users are behind some pretty nasty firewalls. If I were designing for consumers, I wouldn't have put nearly the emphasis on security that we did in Groove.

Clarke: Freenet is quite an efficient way to distribute information, in that it moves informatiob closer to where the demand is, and it duplicates popular information.

Kan: Gnutella is very bandwidth-consumptive. The enterprise is a closed environment. For gnutella in the enterprise, we've provided a gateway for gnutella use, much like clip2 Reflector.

Deep: In the enterprise, their problem is how to give control to users while still making IT's life tolerable. We're going to give control to users everyway we can without centralization.

Get Clay Shirky's perspective on IT concerns vs. users in his latest column, P2P Smuggled In Under Cover of Darkness.