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.

First published in the Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2000.

On Wednesday, federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ordered Napster, a
company that provides software allowing users to swap MP3 music files
over the Internet, to stop facilitating the trading of copyrighted
material by midnight today. Now the argument surrounding digital
downloading of music enters a new phase.

In business terms, this is a crushing blow for Napster. Although
Napster gets to keep its “community” intact, in that it can still
offer its chat function, Napster users will have no reason to use the
Napster chat software for any purpose other than trading information
on alternative sources of free MP3s like Napagator and Gnutella. If
Napster is kept offline for any length of time, it will likely lose so
much market share to these competitors and others that it will not be
able to recover even if the ruling is later overturned.

MP3 Files

For the Recording Industry Association of America, which sued Napster,
Judge Patel’s order is a powerful demonstration that it can cause
enormous difficulties for companies that try to shut the major record
labels out of the Internet distribution game. But the recording
industry association should not be sanguine simply because the total
number of MP3 files being moved around the Internet will plummet, at
least temporarily.

There are still well over 10 million users out there who have become
used to downloading music over the Internet. Napster or no Napster,
someone is going to service this enormous and still growing
appetite. The recording industry cannot expect that one court ruling,
or even many court rulings, will turn back the tide of technology.

Closing Napster as an outlet will have no effect on the underlying
ability of average users to create and listen to MP3 files. It is not
Napster that is digitizing music, it is the users themselves, using
cheap personal computers and free software. And it is the users’
willingness to trade copyrighted material, not Napster’s willingness
to facilitate those trades, that the record industry should be worried
about.

For the record companies, the issue is plain and simple — what
Napster is doing is illegal, and Judge Patel has ruled in their
favor. Legality isn’t the whole story, however. The critical thing for
the music executives to realize is that while they have not lost the
right to enforce copyright laws, their ability to do so is waning.

The analogy here is to the 55 miles-per-hour speed limit, which turned
out to be unenforceable because accelerator pedals are standard
operating equipment on a car. Likewise, government cannot control the
fact that computers are capable of making an unlimited number of
perfect copies of a file.

The current legal ruling has not taken a single Rio music player off
the shelves, nor destroyed a single piece of WinAmp music software,
nor deleted a single MP3 file. More to the point, it has not, and will
not, prevent anyone from “ripping” a CD, turning every track into a
separate MP3 file, in less time than it actually takes to listen to
the CD in the first place.

Napster did achieve an ease of use coupled with a distributed source
of files that no one else has been able to touch, so the short-term
advantage here is to the recording industry. The industry now has a
more favorable bargaining position with Napster, and it has a couple
of months to regroup and propose some Napster-like system before
Napster’s users disperse to new services. This new system must give
fans a way to download music without the expense and restrictions of
the current CD format, which requires you to buy either a dozen songs
or none.

If the industry doesn’t meet this demand, and quickly, it may find
that it’s traded the evil it knew for one it doesn’t know. The lesson
that new Internet music companies will take from the Napster case is
that they should either be hosted offshore (where U.S. laws don’t
apply) or they should avoid storing information about music files in a
central location. Either option would be far worse for the record
industry than Napster.

Napster at least provides one central spot for the music industry to
monitor the activity of consumers. Driving Napster completely out of
business could lead to total market fragmentation, which the industry
could never control.

Digital Is Different

It’s very hard to explain to businesses that have for years been able
to charge high margins for distributing intellectual property in a
physical format that the digital world is different, but that doesn’t
make it any less true. If the record labels really want to keep their
customers from going completely AWOL, they will use this ruling to
negotiate a deal with Napster on their own terms.

In all likelihood, though, the record executives will believe what so
many others used to believe: The Internet may have disrupted other
business models, but we are uniquely capable of holding back the
tide. As Rocky the Flying Squirrel put it so eloquently, “That trick
never works.”

Napster, the wildly popular software that allows users to trade music over the Internet, could be shut down later this month if the Recording Industry Association of America gets an injunction it is seeking in federal court in California. The big record companies in the association — along with the angry artists who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week — maintain that Napster is
nothing more than a tool for digital piracy.

But Napster and the MP3 technology it exploits have changed the music business no matter how the lawsuit comes out. Despite all the fuss about copyright and legality, the most important freedom Napster has spread across the music world is not freedom from cost, but freedom of choice.

Napster, by linking music lovers and letting them share their collections, lets them select from a boundless range of music, one song at a time. This is a huge change from the way the music industry currently does business, and even if Napster Inc. disappears, it won’t be easy to persuade customers to go back to getting their music as the music industry has long packaged it.

Most albums have only two or three songs that any given listener likes, but the album format forces people to choose between paying for a dozen mediocre songs to get those two or three, or not getting any of the songs at all. This all-or-nothing approach has resulted in music collections that are the barest approximation of a listener’s
actual tastes. Even CD ”singles” have been turned into multi-track mini-albums almost as expensive as the real thing, and though there have been some commercial ”mix your own CD” experiments in recent years, they foundered because major labels wouldn’t allow access to their collections a song at a time.

Napster has demonstrated that there are no technological barriers to gaining access to the world’s music catalogue, just commercial ones.

Napster users aren’t merely cherry-picking the hits off well-known albums. Listeners are indulging all their contradictory interests, constantly updating their playlists with a little Bach, a little Beck or a little Buckwheat Zydeco, as the mood strikes them. Because it knows nothing of genre, a Napster search produces a cornucopia of
alternate versions: Hank Williams’s ”I’m So Lonesome I Could Die” as interpreted by both Dean Martin and the Cowboy Junkies, or two dozen covers of ”Louie Louie.”

Napster has become a tool for musical adventure, producing more diversity by accident than the world music section of the local record store does by design: a simple search for the word ”water” brings up Simon and Garfunkel’s ”Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Deep Purple’s ”Smoke on the Water,” ”Cool Water” by the Sons of the Pioneers and ”Water No Get Enemy” by Fela Anikulapo Kuti. After experiencing this freedom, music lovers are not going to go happily back to buying albums.

The question remains of how artists will be paid when songs are downloaded over the Internet, and there are many sources of revenue being bandied about—advertising, sponsorship, user subscription, pay-per-song. But merely recreating the CD in cyberspace will not work.

In an echo of Prohibition, Napster users have shown that they are willing to break the law to escape the constraints of all-or-nothing musical choices. This won’t be changed by shutting down Napster. The music industry is going to have to find some way to indulge its customers in their newfound freedom.

First published on Biz2, 06/00.

It’s not enough that Napster is erasing the distinction between client
and server (discussed in an earlier column); its erasing the
distinction between consumer and provider as well. You can see the
threat to the established order in a recent legal action: A San Diego
cable ISP, Cox@Home, ordered customers to stop running Napster not
because they were violating copyright laws, but because Napster allows
Cox subscribers to serve files from their home PCs. Cox has built its
service on the current web architecture, where producers serve content
from from always-connected servers at the internet’s center, and
consumers consume from intermittantly-connected client PCs at the
edges. Napster, on the other hand, inaugurates a model where PCs are
always on and always connected, where content is increasingly stored
and served from the edges of the network, and where the distinction
between client and server is erased. Set aside Napster’s legal woes —
“Cox vs. Napster” isn’t just a legal fight, its a fight over the
difference between information consumers and information
providers. The question of the day is “Can Cox (or any media business)
force its users to retain their second-class status as mere consumers
of information.” To judge by Napster’s growth and the rise of
Napster-like services such as gnutella, freenet, and wrapster, the
answer is “No”.

The split between consumers and providers of information has its roots
in the internet’s addressing scheme. A computer can only be located on
by its internet protocol (IP) address, like 127.0.0.1, and although
you can attach a more memorable name to those numbers, like
makemoneyfast.com, the domain name is just an alias — the IP address
is the defining feature. By the mid-90’s there weren’t enough to go
around, so ISPs started randomly assigning IP addresses whenever a
user dialed in. This means that users never have a fixed IP address,
so while they can consume data stored elsewhere, they can never
provide anything from their own PCs. This division wasn’t part of the
internet’s original architecture, but the proposed fix (the next
generation of IP, called IPv6) has been coming Real Soon Now for a
long time. In the meantime, services like Cox have been built with the
expectation that this consumer/provider split would remain in effect
for the forseeable future.

How short the forseeable future sometimes is. Napster short-circuits
the temporary IP problem by turning the domain name system inside out:
with Napster, you register a name for your PC and every time you
connect, it makes your current IP address an alias to that name,
instead of the other way around. This inversion makes it trivially
easy to host content on a home PC, which destroys the assymetry of
“end users consume but can’t provide”. If your computer is online, it
can be reached, even without a permanent IP address, and any material
you decide to host on your PC can become globally accessible.
Napster-style architecture erases the people-based distinction of
provider and consumer just as surely as it erases the computer-based
distinction between server and client.

There could not be worse news for Cox, since the limitations of cable
ISP’s only become apparent if its users actually want to do something
useful with their upstream bandwidth, but the fact that cable
companies are hamstrung by upstream speed (less than a tenth of its
downstream speed in Cox’s case) just makes them the first to face the
eroding value of the media bottleneck. Any media business that relies
on a neat division between information consumer and provider will be
affected. Sites like Geocities or The Globe, which made their money
providing fixed addresses for end user content, may find that users
are perfectly content to use their PCs as that fixed address.
Copyright holders who have assumed up until now that large-scale
serving of material could only take place on a handful of relatively
identifiable and central locations are suddenly going to find that the
net has sprung another million leaks. Meanwhile, the rise of the end
user as info provider will be good news for other businesses. DSL
companies will have a huge advantage in the race to provide fast
upstream bandwidth; Apple may find that the ability to stream home
movies over the net from a PC at home drives adoption of Mac hardware
and software; and of course companies that provide the Napster-style
service of matching dynamic IP addresses with fixed names will have
just the sort of sticky relationship with their users that VC’s slaver
over.

Real technological revolutions are human revolutions as well. The
architecture of the internet has affected the largest transfer of
power from organizations to individuals the world has ever seen, and
Napster’s destruction on the serving limitations on end users
demonstrates taht this change has not yet run its course. Media
businesses which have assumed that all the power that has been
transferred to the individual for things like stock broking and
airline tickets wouldn’t affect them are going to find that the
millions of passive consumers are being replaced by millions of
one-person media channels. This is not to say that all content is
going to the edges or the net, or that every user is going to be an
enthusiastic media outlet, but when the limitations of “Do I really
want to (or know how to) upload my home video?” go away, the total
amount of user generated and hosted content is going to explode beyond
anything the Geocities model allows. This will have two big effects:
the user’s power as a media outlet of one will be dramatically
increased, creating unexpected new competition with corporate media
outlets; and the spread of hosting means that the lawyers of copyright
holders can no longer go to Geocities to acheive leverage over
individual users — in the age of user-as-media-outlet, lawsuits will
have to be undertaken one user at a time. That old saw about the press
only being free for people who own a printing press is about to take
on a whole new resonanace.