In 1999, while a student at Northeastern University in Boston, Sean Fanning created the Napster P2P music filesharing service. Napster caught on so quickly that soon record labels and some artists (such as Madonna and members of the Metallica band) complained that it was being used to illegally share copyrighted songs. By December 1999 the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had already filed a lawsuit against the fledgling company, leading to its shutdown in 2001 (subsequently another company bought the Napster name and logo and it offers a fee-based file sharing service). In the meantime, other Napster-like services, including Grokster, Kazaa, BitTorrent, eDonkey and others were coming online, so P2P file sharing continued to be easy and ubiquitous. Many people have debated whether these services are unethical, but in the U.S. the courts have ruled that if copyrighted material is exchanged over such a service, it can be legally shut down.
Although P2P file sharing eliminates the bottlenecks that arise when many users seek files stored on few servers, it can nevertheless increase network congestion when users are concentrated geographically, such as on college campuses (Dzubeck, 2005). Both colleges and Internet service providers have complained about this problem. As a step aimed at reducing their internal network traffic, as well as out of respect for intellectual property rights, and to avoid lawsuits, some U.S. colleges have banned their students from using their college email accounts and other college-provided network services for file sharing. However, critics have noted that some P2P file sharing is perfect legal and that an outright ban unfair penalizes those users who act in an ethical and responsible fashion (see for example Navin, 2006).
After Napster was shut down, another P2P player that emerged was Kazaa, a music file-sharing service founded by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, who subsequently sold parts of the company to Sharman Networks. They then formed an Internet telephony business, Skype, that also was based on P2P. eBay saw enough potential in Friis and Zennstrom’s P2P technology that they bought the company for $2.6 billion in 2005. Then in 2006, Friis and Zennstrom announced that they were working on a venture dubbed the Venice Project, in which P2P technology will provide the foundation for a licensed video and film-sharing service (Green, 2006; Rosenbush, 2006). Clearly, these two visionaries believe that the ability of P2P to spread the processing load across participating computers represents a viable business opportunity in several domains.
With the resolution of some of the lawsuits, Napster re-emerged as a legitimate fee-based file-sharing service, although many reports indicate that they are struggling to reach profitability. BitTorrent, another popular file sharing service, was also re-launched and now offer ways for paying customers to legitimately pay for and obtain music, film, and video files.
The P2P controversy continues. Business Week reported in February 2007 that “illegal files still account for an estimated 90% of the music download market.” (Holahan, 2007). However, some music labels have stated that they no longer plan to attempt to block illegal downloading, and some companies, such as Skyrider and Internet MediaWorks, offer services that attach advertisements to shared files (Myer, 2007).
Many observers have reported that P2P networks are the targets for distributed denial-of-service attacks, worms, and other malware that can affect users’ computers and their ability to share files. “Bad guys” recognize the enormous popularity of file sharing and launch opportunistic attacks aimed to affect large numbers of users. Other bad guys use “botnets” to rapidly reach large numbers of users’ machines, leading to the emergence of an underground market for advertising bounties. Bots are programmed to look like P2P users’ agents, which in turn can fool advertising network services into believing that large numbers of real users have viewed various advertisements (companies usually pay advertising networks based on the number of “impressions,” or user hits; Hines, 2007).
Meanwhile, all the publicity about Napster got many IS managers thinking about the possibilities for using P2P technologies to improve corporate IS productivity. One observer (Kharif, 2001) summed up the perceived potential:
“For big companies, the promise of P2P is threefold. By using idle PCs, P2P connections could tap into cheap, underutilized processing power and bandwidth using a technique called distributed processing. By linking users directly, P2P could create easier collaboration, allowing the rapid formation of work groups that sidestep traditional barriers such as firewalls and restricted intranets. Finally, P2P could make information more accessible throughout an enterprise by opening up the desktops of individual employees – allowing staffers to search each other’s virtual desk drawers more freely.”
For the distributed processing benefit, companies looked to examples such as the SETI project (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), in which millions of volunteers agreed to download software that enabled their machines to analyze telescope data when they would otherwise be sitting idle. SETI has since inspired many other examples of this type of volunteer distributed computing (see http://boinc.berkeley.edu/volunteer.php), such as for doing gene sequencing, protein analysis, analyzing clinical trials data, and stress-testing of eCommerce sites. While many people view these distributed computing examples as a form of P2P, others argue that it is not quite P2P since a central server sends out the telescope data, and peers do not directly communicate with one another.
An example of an initiative aimed at using P2P technologies to both enable collaboration and to make information available throughout an enterprise is a product offered by Groove Networks, a company founded in 1997 by Ray Ozzie, a renowned computer scientist who was the architect of Lotus Notes. Groove users can easily share in the preparation of various documents, and files stored on any Groover user’s machine can be available to all other Groove users. This is an interesting example, because it represents a departure from how companies have been approaching enterprise software in recent years. ERP software relies on a centralized (or virtually centralized) database of business and financial transactions, and many early knowledge management systems took the same approach by creating centralized (or virtually centralized) knowledge repositories. Groove, in contrast, does not attempt to centralize data and documents. In 2005 Microsoft announced that it was acquiring Groove; subsequently Ray Ozzie took on the role of the chief software architect for Microsoft. Microsoft’s acquisition of Groove, and the appointment of Ozzie to his influential post are two indicators that this software giant sees potential in P2P file sharing and in distributed computing in general.
Although in the late nineties there was much excitement about P2P’s potential for both consumer and enterprise applications, a dramatic and widespread U.S. technology downturn in spring 2000 put such ideas on hold for several years. Many managers adopted a conservative wait-and-see attitude to spending plans for all new technologies. As to P2P in particular, many managers also preferred to wait until some of the lawsuits were resolved.
Today there continues to be strong interest in understanding how P2P impacts network traffic, and how P2P can be harnessed to utilize excess capacity on user’s PCs. MIT’s Technology Review magazine reported in 2007 that “TV shows, YouTube clips, animations, and other video applications already account for more than 60 percent of Internet traffic” and was predicted to rise to as high as 98 percent by 2010 (Roush, 2007). Both this piece and another study reported in 2007 that P2P connections can help alleviate network congestion when files are served up from nodes distributed all over the world, instead of concentrated in a few servers.
In an interesting twist, researchers used P2P technology to gather more than six million data points per day for two years, yielding a map of the Internet’s structure. They found that although a huge volume of Internet traffic worldwide today passes through about 80 key nodes, many other nodes are well connected with other peer computers and could thus bypass these key nodes if necessary. Researchers are working to develop new networking tools to distribute network loads more effectively (Carni, et al., 2007; Graham-Rowe, 2007). For example, a system called Chunkyspread developed by Cornell University professor Paul Francis, reduces the need to broadcast metadata about files, by assigning “slices” of files to each participating user. As explained in Technology Review: “A slice consists of the nth bit of every block – for example, the fifth bit in every block of 20 bits. Alice’s PC might obtain a commitment from Bob’s PC to send bit five from every block it possesses, from Carol’s PC to send bit six, and so forth. Once these commitments are made, no more metadata need change hands, saving bandwidth.” (Roush, 2007).
In recent years there has been an increase in reports of government organizations—such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security – and companies -- such as xxx -- investing in P2P applications. And, another acclaimed computer scientist – Alan Kay, who invented several key personal computer innovations (including the graphical user interface) during his years at Xerox PARC, is touting the expected benefits of a new software developer kit for collaborative applications, Croquet, which will be based on P2P principles (see http://croquetconsortium.org).
There have also been reports of P2P problems. For example, in June 2007 pharmaceutical giant Pfizer stated that the spouse of an employee had inadvertently leaked personal information on more than 17,000 employees stored on a company computer. The individual had included the directory in which the file was stored as an allowable source for a music-sharing application (Leyden, 2007).
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