Date: Mar. 14, 2001
Link: http://webreview.com/2001/03_09/strategists/index01.shtml
Source Author or Organization: Molly E. Holzschlag, Julie Sullivan, WebReview.com

In this article the authors explore the current Peer-To-Peer (P2P) phenomenon. Jaded to exitement over yet another Next Big Thing sans evidence, they attempt to arrive at a better understanding of what P2P really is, and to to separate and examine both technological and ideological aspects. In their research the authors attend the first P2P conference in San Francisco, hosted by O'Reilly & Associates, which they found "inspiring."

Among the technologists and developers the authors encountered P2P definitions ranging from "a class of applications that takes advantage of resources (storage, cycles, content, human presence) available at the edges of the Internet" (Clay Shirky) to "P2P is whoever says they're P2P." Ultimately Tim O'Reilly's discussion of Napster led them to use it as a model to explore the issues.

Considering people from all global localities, races, religions, nationalities, backgrounds, cultures, property models and understandings of intellectual property, all exchanging information one to one, the authors decide Tim O'Reilly illustrates the proper perspective when he asserts "The recent furor over Peer-to-Peer file sharing using Napster masks a deeper revolution."

Similarly, they find that much discussion of the current profitibility of P2P companies misses the expense-side news venture capitalists find interesting, for example, not paying for bandwidth centrally, or in some cases paying little for inventory. Some technologists maintain the true benefit is that everything on the Web will work better, true power will move to the desktop, and the browser will truly be bi-directional. The article finishes with a conclusion about the conference that could also be a conclusion about the current state of P2P, "The true theme of the conference was that the Web has finally reached a point where this type of idealized interactivity could happen."