Not all P2P is evil

Allow me to step up on this conveniently available box of soap for a minute. I can't tell you the number of discussions I’ve been in where my conversation partner erroneously assumed that "P2P" was strictly synonymous with file sharing, copyright infringement, bandwidth hogging, and corporate time wasting. My viewpoint is that the term "P2P" references a specific network/communication design (i.e. arbitrary peers talk to other peers, rather than clients talk to dedicated servers), and not a particular usage. In other words, P2P is a communication technology platform that is agnostic to the application built on top of it. There are video delivery applications, file sharing applications, VoIP applications, IM applications, and privacy shielding applications that are built using P2P as their communication framework. You cannot define P2P as being any single one of those (particularly file sharing); and there are many legitimate uses for many of those listed applications. In fact, many businesses use functional non-P2P alternatives of those same types of applications on a daily basis.

Now, I completely understand and agree that P2P has received this bad reputation because the earliest adopters of the P2P communication model were applications that many organizations consider questionable. That's why I'm always happy to find uses of P2P that provide a positive benefit. A recent example I ran across was the Network Early Warning System (NEWS), which uses P2P communication to cross-talk and alert about network connectivity and traffic issues. The Northwestern University Aqualab (creators of NEWS) liken NEWS to a "neighborhood watch for the Internet," with particular benefits to ISPs. Aqualab also has many other ongoing projects that relate to improving the performance and scalability of P2P communication models.

There is also Pando, a company that offers what they call a "peer assisted" content delivery service that is targeted to businesses needing to deliver large amounts of media to their users. Basically they have married the traditional CDN concept with a P2P communication and distribution model, resulting in something they say scales significantly better (thus making less costly) than the traditional CDN approach. As an aside, our research shows that Pando is actually a tweaked version of BitTorrent that runs over standard SSL, which allows it to be served over port 443 with ease.

So the next time someone says "P2P is evil," remind them that P2P is just a platform utilized by many different applications, and they should clarify which P2P application(s) they have in mind.

- Jeff