First published on Biz2, 10/00.

Premature definition is a danger for any movement. Once a definitive
label is applied to a new phenomenon, it invariably begins shaping —
and possibly distorting — people’s views. So it is with the current
revolution, where Napster, SETI@Home, and their cousins now seem to be
part of a larger and more coherent change in the nature of the
internet. There have been many attempts to describe this change in a
phrase — decentralization, distributed computing — but the label
that seems to have stuck is peer-to-peer. And now that peer-to-peer is
the name of the game, the rush is on to apply this definition both as
a litmus test and as a marketing tool.

This is leading to silliness of the predictable sort — businesses
that have nothing in common with Napster, Gnutella, or Freeserve are
nevertheless re-inventing themselves as “peer-to-peer” companies,
applying the term like a fresh coat of paint over a tired business
model. Meanwhile, newly vigilant interpreters of the revolution are
now suggesting that Napster itself is not “truly peer-to-peer”,
because it relies on a centralized server to host its song list.

It seems obvious, but bears repeating: definitions are only useful as
tools for sharpening one’s perception of reality. If Napster isn’t
peer-to-peer, then “peer-to-peer” is a bad description of what’s
happening. Napster is the killer app for this revolution, and defining
it out of the club after the fact is like saying “Sure it might work
in practice, but it will never fly in theory.”

No matter what you call it, what is happening is this: PCs, and in
particular their latent computing power, are for the first time being
integrated directly into the fabric of the internet.

PCs are the dark matter of the internet. Like the barely detectable
stuff that makes up most of the mass of the universe, PCs are
connected to the internet by the hundreds of millions but have very
little discernable effect on the whole, because they are largely
unused as anything other than dumb clients (and expensive dumb
clients to boot.) From the point of view of most of the internet
industry, a PC is nothing more than a life-support system for a
browser and a place to store cookies.

PCs have been restricted to this expensive-but-dumb client mode for
many historical reasons — slow CPUs, small disks, flakey OSs, slow
and intermittant connections, no permanent IP addresses — but with
the steady growth in hardware quality, connectivity, and user base,
the PCs at the edges of the network now represent an astonishing and
untapped pool of computing power.

At a conservative estimate, the world’s net-connected PCs host an
aggregate 10 billion Mhz of processing power and 10 thousand terabytes
of storage. And this calculation assumes 100 million PCs among the
net’s 300 million users, with an average chip speed of 100 Mhz and an
average 100 Mb hard drive. And these numbers continue to climb —
today, sub-$2K PCs have an order of magnitude more processing power
and two orders of magnitude more storage than this assumed average.

This is the fuel powering the current revolution — the latent
capabilities of PC hardware made newly accessible represent a huge,
untapped resource. No matter how it gets labelled (and peer-to-peer
seems likely to stick), the thing that software like the Gnutella file
sharing system and the Popular Power distributed computing network
have in common is an ability to harness this dark matter, the otherwise
underused hardware at the edges of the net.

Note though that this isn’t just “Return of the PC”, because in these
new models, PCs aren’t just personal computers, they’re promiscious
computers, hosting data the rest of the world has access to, a la
Napster, and sometimes even hosting calculations that are of no use to
the PC’s owner at all, like Popular Powers influenza virus
simulations. Furthermore, the PCs themselves are being disaggregated
— Popular Power will take as much CPU time as it can get but needs
practically no storage, while Gnutella needs vast amounts of disk
space but almost no CPU time. And neither kind of business
particularly needs the operating system — since the important
connection is often with the network rather than the local user, Intel
and Seagate matter more to the peer-to-peer companies than do
Microsoft or Apple.

Its early days yet for this architectural shift, and the danger of the
peer-to-peer label is that it may actually obscure the real
engineering changes afoot. With improvements in hardware, connectivity
and sheer numbers still mounting rapidly, anyone who can figure how to
light up the internet’s dark matter gains access to a large and
growing pool of computing resources, even if some of the functions are
centralized (again, like Napster or Popular Power.)

Its still too soon to see who the major players will be, but don’t
place any bets on people or companies reflexively using the
peer-to-peer label. Bet instead on the people figuring out how to
leverage the underused PC hardware, because the actual engineering
challenges in taking advantage of the world’s PCs matters more — and
will create more value — than merely taking on the theoretical
challenges of peer-to-peer architecture.

Napster has always been a revolution within the commercial music business, not against it, and yesterday’s deal between BMG and Napster demonstrates that at least one of the 5 major labels understands that. The press release was short on details, but the rough outlines of the deal has Bertelsmann dropping its lawsuit and instead working with Napster to create subscription-based access to its entire music
catalog online. Despite a year of legal action by the major labels, and despite the revolutionary fervor of some of Napster’s users, Napster’s success has more to do with the economics of digital music than with copyright law, and the BMG deal is merely a recognition of those economic realities.

Until Napster, the industry had an astonishingly successful run in producing digital music while preventing digital copying from taking place on a wide scale, managing to sideline DAT, Minidisc, and recordable CDs for years. Every time any of the major labels announced an online initiative, it was always based around digital rights
management schemes like SDMI, designed to make the experience of buying and playing digital files at least as inconvenient as physical albums and tapes.

In this environment, Napster was a cold shower. Napster demonstrated how easily and cheaply music could be distributed by people who did not have a vested interest in preserving inefficiency. This in turn reduced the industry to calling music lovers ‘pirates’ (even though Napster users weren’t in it for the money, surely the definition of piracy), or trying to ‘educate’ us about about why we should be happy to pay as much for downloaded files as for a CD (because it was costing them so much to make downloaded music inconvenient.)

As long as the labels kept whining, Napster looked revolutionary, but once BMG finally faced the economic realities of online distribution and flat rate pricing, the obvious partner for the new era was Napster. That era began in earnest yesterday, and the people in for the real surprise are not the music executives, who are after all
adept at reading popular sentiment, and who stand to make more money from the recurring revenues of a subscription model. The real surprise is coming for those users who convinced themselves that Napster’s growth had anything to do with anti-authoritarian zeal.

Despite the rants of a few artists and techno-anarchists who believed that Napster users were willing to go to the ramparts for the cause, large scale civil disobedience against things like like Prohibition or the 55 mph speed limit has usually been about relaxing restrictions, not repealing them. You can still make gin for free in your bathub, but nobody does it anymore, because the legal liquor industry now sells high-quality gin at a reasonable price, with restrictions that society can live with.

Likewise, the BMG deal points to a future where you can subscribe to legal music from Napster for an attractive price, music which, as a bonus, won’t skip, end early, or be misindexed. Faced with the choice between shelling out five bucks a month for high quality legal access or mastering gnutella, many music lovers will simply plump for the subscription. This will in turn reduce the number of copyright violators, making it easier for the industry to go after them, which will drive still more people to legal subscriptions, and so on.

For a moment there, as Napster’s usage went through the roof while the music industry spread insane propaganda about the impending collapse of all professional music making, one could imagine that the collective will of 30 million people looking for free Britney Spears songs constituted some sort of grass roots uprising against The Man. As the BMG deal reverberates through the industry, though, it will become apparent that those Napster users were really just agitating for better prices. In unleashing these economic effects, Napster has almost single-handedly dragged the music industry into the internet age. Now the industry is repaying the favor by dragging Napster into the mainstream of the music business.

First published on Biz2, 10/00

The Domain Name System is coming apart at the seams. DNS, the protocol which maps IP addresses like 206.107.251.22 to domain names like FindDentist.com, is showing its age after almost 20 years. It has proved unable to adapt to dynamic internet addresses, to the number of new services being offered, and particularly to the needs of end users, who are increasingly using their PCs to serve files, host
software, and even search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. As these PCs become a vital part of the internet infrastructure, they need real addresses just as surely as yahoo.com does. This is something the DNS system can’t offer them, but the competitors to DNS can.

The original DNS system was invented, back in the early 80s, for distinctly machine-centric world. Internet-connected computers were rare, occupying a few well-understood niches in academic and government labs. This was a world of permanence: any given computer would always have one and only one IP address, and any given IP address would have one and only one domain name. Neat and tidy and static.

Then along came 1994, the Year of the Web, when the demand for connecting PCs directly to the internet grew so quickly that the IP namespace — the total number of addresses — was too small to meet the demand. In response, the ISPs began doling out temporary IP addresses on an as-needed basis, which kept PCs out of the domain name system: no permanent IP, no domain name. This wasn’t a problem in the mid-90s — PCs were so bad, and modem connections so intermittent, that no one really thought of giving PCs their own domain names.

Over the last 5 years, though, cheap PC hardware has gotten quite good, operating systems have gotten distinctively less flaky, and connectivity via LAN, DSL and cable have given us acceptable connections. Against the background of these remarkable improvements, the DNS system got no better at all — anyone with a PC was still a
second-class citizen with no address, and it was Napster, ICQ, and their cousins, not the managers of the DNS system, who stepped into this breech.

These companies, realizing that interesting services could be run off of PCs if only they had real addresses, simply ignored DNS and replaced the machine-centric model with a protocol-centric one. Protocol-centric addressing creates a parallel namespace for each piece of software, and the mapping of ICQ or Napster usernames to temporary IP addresses is not handled by the net’s DNS servers but by
privately owned servers dedicated to each protocol — the ICQ server matches ICQ names to the users’ current IP address, and so on. As a side-effect of handling dynamic IP addresses, these protocols are also able to handle internet address changes in real time, while current DNS system can take several days to fully log a change.

In Napster’s case, protocol-centric addressing merely turns Napster into customized ftp for music files. The real action is in software like ICQ, which not only uses protocol-centric addressing schemes, but where the address points to a person, not a machine. When I log into ICQ, I’m me, no matter what machine I’m at, and no matter what IP address is presently assigned to that machine. This completely decouples what humans care about — can I find my friends and talk with them online — with how the machines go about it — route message A to IP address X.

This is analgous to the change in telephony brought about by mobile phones. In the same way a phone number is no longer tied to a particular location but is now mapped to the physical location of the phone’s owner, an ICQ address is mapped to me, not to a machine, no matter where I am.

This does not mean that the DNS system is going away, any more than landlines went away with the invention of mobile telephony. It does mean that DNS is no longer the only game in town. The rush is now on, with instant messaging protocols, single sign-on and wallet applications, and the explosion in peer-to-peer businesses, to create
and manage protocol-centric addresses, because these are essentially privately owned, centrally managed, instantly updated alternatives to DNS.

This also does not mean that this change is entirely to the good. While it is always refreshing to see people innovate their way around a bottleneck, sometimes bottlenecks are valuable. While ICQ and Napster came to their addressing schemes honestly, any number of people have noticed how valuable it is to own a namespace, and many business plans making the rounds are just me-too copies of Napster or
ICQ, which will make an already growing list of kinds of addresses — phone, fax, email, url, ICQ, … — explode into meaninglessness.

Protocol-centric namespaces will also force the browser into lesser
importance, as users return to the days they namaged multiple pieces
of internet software, or it will mean that addresses like
icq://12345678 or napster://green_day_fan will have to be added to the
browsers repetoire of recognized URLs. Expect the rise of
‘meta-address’ servers as well, which offer to manage a user’s
addresses for all of these competing protocols, and even to translate
from one kind of address to another. (These meta-address servers will,
of course, need their own addressses as well.)

Its not clear what is going to happen to internet addressing, but it is clear that its going to get a lot more complicated before it gets simpler. Fortunately, both the underlying IP addressing system and the design of URLs can handle this explosion of new protocols and addresses, but that familiar DNS bit in the middle (which really put the dot in dot com) will never recover the central position it has occupied in the last 2 decades, and that means that a critical piece of internet infrastructure is now up for grabs.

Thanks to Dan Gilmor of the San Jose Mercury News for pointing out to me the important relationship between peer-to-peer networking and DNS.