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Subject: [RRE]Peer-to-Peer and the Promise of Internet Equality
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Peer-to-Peer and the Promise of Internet Equality
Philip E. Agre
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California 90095-1520
USA
[log in to unmask]
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
This is a draft. You are welcome to forward it, but please do not
quote from it. Comments appreciated.
Version of 15 November 2001.
2500 words.
Technologies often come wrapped in stories about politics. In the
case of peer-to-peer technologies on the Internet, the standard story
goes like this:
Once the world was centralized under the control of a top-down
hierarchy. Then came the Internet, a decentralized network
architecture that lets everyone build their own services
and prevents anyone from regulating them. Peer-to-peer (P2P)
technologies deliver on the Internet's promise, and they will
lead us to a decentralized world of freedom and equality.
I propose to analyze this story.
An initial problem is the term "peer-to-peer". As the story suggests,
it can be hard to distinguish P2P computing from the Internet in
general. For example, why isn't e-mail peer-to-peer? And if SETI@Home
(Anderson 2001) is an example of P2P computing despite its centralized
structure (a central server that interacts with numerous personal
computers that contribute their spare cycles), then why isn't the
Web also P2P, given that its client-server structure is much less
centralized? Shirky (2001) proposes that P2P systems form a distinct
category because they use mechanisms other than the domain name system
(DNS) to identify and track their participants. Yet this definition
seems arbitrary. Whatever the ills of the DNS, surely there exist
other potential tracking mechanisms that are even worse.
In reality, I suggest, P2P does not name a distinct category of
distributed computing systems. Rather, it signifies a certain
project: pushing the design of all computing systems toward a fully
decentralized ideal. Yet much remains unclear. To begin with,
observe that the standard story shifts between two kinds of "center",
architectural and institutional. By "architecture" I mean the
concepts that are designed into a technology. Examples include
the von Neumann serial processor, the client-server distinction,
and the relational database. By "institution" I mean the concepts
that organize language, rules, job titles, and other social categories
in a given sector of society. Examples include the concepts of
"patient", "case", and "disease" in the medical system. Architectures
and institutions are often related, and systems analysts have
developed sophisticated methods of translating institutional concepts
into system architectures. The standard story suggests, very simply,
that decentralized architectures will bring about decentralized
institutions (see, e.g., Gilder 1992).
Yet this hardly follows. Architectures and institutions are often
shaped to fit another another, but they are still different sorts of
things. As a means of evaluating the prospects for P2P, therefore,
I will briefly present four theories of the relation between
architectures and institutions. Each theory will be associated with
a particular theorist of institutions.
1. Veblen
Thorstein Veblen wrote during the Progressive Era, when tremendous
numbers of professional societies were being founded, and he foresaw
a society that was organized rationally by engineers rather than
through the speculative chaos of the market. Veblen was impressed
by a profession's ability to pool knowledge among its members, and
he emphasized the collective learning process through which industry
grows. (On Veblen's theory, see Hodgson (1999).)
Veblen's theory resembles some of the claims made for the Internet:
open information, universally shared, giving rise to a group mind.
In fact, the rise of professions was facilitated by the communications
and transportation infrastructures of the 19th century. As Chandler
(1977) observes, the first modern professional associations were
organized by railroad employees, who used the new telegraph and
the railroad infrastructures, as well as printed newsletters and
organized conferences, to build new institutions of knowledge-sharing.
The infrastructures, in turn, had gone through a tumultuous history
of decentralized innovation and increasing centralization under the
control of large firms.
2. Hayek
Friedrich Hayek was an Austrian economist who withdrew from technical
research to provide intellectual ammunition for the fight against
communism. His most famous argument is that no centralized authority
could possibly synthesize all of the knowledge that the participants
in a complex market use in making their allocation decisions (Hayek
1963). This emphasis on knowledge was outside the mainstream of
economic thought at the time, and it remains largely so even today.
But Hayek was not an anarchist. He argued that a market society
requires an institutional substrate that upholds principles such
as the rule of law (Hayek 1960). A productive tension is evident
in Hayek's work: he is attracted to notions of self-organization
that seem like the opposite of governmental control, but he is also
aware that self-organization presupposes institutions generally and
government institutions in particular.
Hayek's work, like Veblen's, challenges us to understand what a
"center" is. In some cases, intuitions are clear. French society
is highly centralized. Switzerland has been remarkably decentralized
for centuries. And the federal systems of the United States and
Germany lie somewhere in the middle. In each case, we reckon degrees
of centralization by the constitutional distribution of political
authority.
But centers and centralization can be understood in other ways.
Observe that institutions, like architectures, are typically organized
in layers. Legislatures and courts are institutions that create
other institutions, namely laws. Contract law is an institution,
but then so are individual contracts. Internet protocols, likewise,
are organized in layers, each of which creates ground rules for the
ones above it. Do the more basic layers count as "centers"? Yes,
if they must be administered by a centralized authority. Yes, if
global coordination is required to change them. No, if they arise
in a locality and propagate throughout the population. At least
sometimes, then, centralization on one layer is a precondition for
decentralization on the layers above it. Complex markets systems,
for example, need their underlying infrastructures and institutions
to be coordinated and standardized. Yet this kind of uniformity has
generally been imposed by powerful governments and monopolies. The
conditions under which decentralized systems can emerge, therefore,
are complicated.
Consider the case of the Internet. Despite its reputation as the very
model of decentralization, the institutions and architecture of the
Internet nonetheless have many centralized aspects, including the DNS,
the IETF, and Microsoft's control over the desktop software market.
But let us consider one aspect of the Internet in particular: the
end-to-end principle (Saltzer, Reed, and Clark 1984), which moves
complexity out of the network itself and into the hosts that use it.
In one sense, this principle is nothing but layering. Each layer in
the Internet protocol stack is kept simple, and new functionalities
are assigned to newly created layers atop the old ones. In another
sense, however, the end-to-end principle shifts complexity away from
the centralized expertise of network engineers, placing it instead
on the desktops of end-users -- the very people who are least able
to manage it. Much of the Internet's history, consequently, has
consisted of attempts to reshuffle this complexity, moving it away
from end-users and into service providers, Web servers, network
administrators, and so on.
As this history makes clear, one layer of an architecture can
have different properties from the layers above and below it.
A decentralized network can support centralized services, or vice
versa. Thus, for example, the asymmetrical client-server architecture
of the Web sits atop the symmetrical architecture of the Internet.
The peer-to-peer movement promises to move the entire network toward
a decentralized ideal. In doing so, it must confront various types
of centralization that are inherent in certain applications. For
example, if users contend for access to the same physical resource,
some kind of global lock will be needed. Most markets have this
property. Some mechanisms do exist for sharing a scarce resource
without an architecturally centralized lock; examples include the
backoff algorithms that both Ethernet and TCP use to control network
congestion. Research on distributed services has long sought to
replicate documents while avoiding the danger of divergent changes
(e.g., Dewan 1999). So the obvious solution of complete architectural
centralization is hardly the only option. Even so, it is a profound
question how thoroughly the functionality of a market mechanism
like NASDAQ, eBay, or SABRE can be distributed to buyer/seller peers.
It is also unclear how useful such a radical decentralization would
be to the market participants.
3. North
For Douglass North (1990: 3), an institution can be understood by
analogy to the rules of a game. The rules of baseball, for example,
define such categories as a "pitcher", "strike", and "infield fly".
An institution, in this sense, is categorical structure that allows
people to coordinate their activities. The institution defines
social roles and creates a terrain upon which individuals navigate.
In particular, the institution creates incentives, such as the profit
motive, that tend to channel participants' actions. Taking markets
as his main example, North suggests that the rules of the game change
only slowly and incrementally. (For an application of North's theory
to the DNS controversy, see Mueller (2000).)
As an example, consider the institutional context in which the
ARPANET and Internet arose (Abbate 1999). In their attempt to create
a decentralized computer network, the program managers at ARPA had
an important advantage: they controlled the finances for a substantial
research community. ARPA made the rules, and they consciously created
incentives that would promote their goals. They compelled their
contractors to use the ARPANET (1999: 46, 50, 55), and they drove the
adoption of electronic mail by methods such as being accessible to
their contractors only through that medium (1999: 107-110). Later on,
they funded implementation of TCP/IP on many vendors' machines (1999:
143) and imposed a death march on their contractors for the transition
to TCP (1999: 140-142).
This centralized institutional environment had subtle consequences
for the decentralized architecture it produced. Because of ARPA's
authority, everyone took for granted that the ARPANET's user community
was self-regulating. This feature of the institution is reflected in
the poor security of the Internet's electronic mail standards. When
the Internet became a public network, the old assumptions no longer
applied. Lasting security problems were the result.
Another example is found in Orlikowski's (1993) celebrated study of
Lotus Notes in a large consulting firm. Notes may not be a wholly
peer-to-peer architecture, but its success was due largely to its
replication strategy, which is crucial for distributed document-
sharing. The CIO of this firm assumed that he could ensure widespread
adoption simply by making the software available on employees'
computers. That did not happen. Orlikowski identified two problems:
(1) most employees were familiar with traditional tools such as
electronic mail, so they used Notes only for those familiar purposes,
and (2) most of the consultants were promoted on the basis of the
distinctive practices that they had built as individuals, so they had
few incentives to share their knowledge. Only when the company began
evaluating employees on their use of Notes, therefore, did adoption
become widespread. Once again, centralized authority was required to
institutionalize decentralized knowledge-sharing.
4. Commons
John Commons was a Progressive Era economist who eventually trained
many of the leaders of the New Deal. Guided by his union background
and the democratic ideals of his time, Commons (1934) viewed every
social institution as a set of working rules defined by collective
bargaining. After all, every institution defines a set of social
roles (doctor-patient, teacher-student, landlord-tenant, and so on),
and each social role defines a community (for example, the community
of doctors and the community of patients). Commons (1924) argues that
each group develops its own culture and practices, which eventually
become codified in law.
Commons' theory helps to explain the development of technical
architectures. Consider, for example, the classic institutional
analysis by Danziger, Dutton, Kling, and Kraemer (1982) of the
development of computer systems in American local governments.
These authors observed that computer architectures are rarely neutral.
Whose functionalities should the system support? Who should gain
information about whom? The design process, therefore, is inevitably
political. Based on survey and interview studies, the authors asked
which factors determined the interests a new computer system would end
up serving. They did find that every affected group had some input
to the decision-making process. But they concluded that new systems
ended up serving the interests of whichever group (for example, the
mayor, the financial department, or the police) already held power.
Commons would view this situation as pathological. He disagreed with
Marx's vision of history as the inevitable victory of one social class
over all others, and preferred a vision of collective bargaining among
evenly matched groups. For this reason, he might have found more hope
in the current war over music distribution. The unexpected growth
of Napster set off an institutional revolution in the music industry,
and Napster's subsequent decline under legal attack should provoke
reflection about that revolution's nature. Napster had a fatal
flaw: although it provided a viable architecture for music sharing,
it did not provide a viable institution for allowing musicians to
make a living. Some bands can make money from live performance or
merchandise, but most bands -- if they make money at all -- still rely
on record sales.
The collective bargaining process that Napster has set in motion,
therefore, has at least three parties: musicians, fans, and record
companies. As in every negotiation, each party has its own political
problems -- comprehending the situation, getting organized, adopting
a common position, coordinating its actions, delegating authority
to a trusted representative, and so on. The negotiation takes
the form of an "ecology of games" (Dutton 1992): conflicts in many
venues, including legislatures, courts, and standards organizations.
What is needed, clearly, is an alternative institutional model that
connects musicians and fans in new ways, ideally without the market
dysfunctions that lead to abusive record industry contracts.
This alternative institution for music distribution will presumably
depend on new technical architectures. Yet, for the moment, most
technical development is aimed at protecting a Napster-like model
from the legal assaults of the record companies. It remains to be
seen whether a thoroughly peer-to-peer "sharing" architecture can
avoid being shut down, particularly if monopolies such as Microsoft
change their own architectures to suit the record companies' needs.
A more important question, though, is whether the drive toward fully
decentralized "sharing" bears any useful relationship to the real
problem of connecting musicans and fans in an economically viable way.
What has been learned? Decentralized institutions do not imply
decentralized architectures, or vice versa. Indeed, the opposite
is just as arguably the case. The drive toward decentralized
architectures need not serve the political purpose of decentralizing
society, and it can even be destructive. Architectures and
institutions will inevitably coevolve, and to the extent they can be
designed, they should be designed together. The peer-to-peer movement
understands that architecture is politics, but it too often assumes
that architecture is a substitute for politics. Radically improved
information and communication technologies do open new possibilities
for institutional change. To explore those possibilities, though,
technologists will need better ideas about institutions.
References
Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
David Anderson, SETI@home, in Andy Oram, ed, Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing
the Power of Disruptive Technologies, O'Reilly, 2001.
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution
in American Business, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.
John R. Commons, Legal Foundations of Capitalism, New York: Macmillan,
1924.
John R. Commons, Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political
Economy, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1934.
James N. Danziger, William H. Dutton, Rob Kling, and Kenneth
L. Kraemer, Computers and Politics: High Technology in American Local
Governments, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Prasun Dewan, Architectures for collaborative applications, in Michel
Beaudouin-Lafon, ed, Computer Supported Co-Operative Work, Chichester,
UK: Wiley, 1999.
William H. Dutton, The ecology of games shaping communications policy,
Communication Theory 2(4), 1992, pages 303-328.
George Gilder, Life after Television, New York: Norton, 1992.
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1960.
Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Economics and Utopia: Why the Learning Economy Is
Not the End of History, London: Routledge, 1999.
Milton Mueller, Technology and institutional innovation: Internet
domain names, International Journal of Communications Law and Policy
5(1), 2000. Available on the Web at
<http://www.IJCLP.org/5_2000/ijclp_webdoc_1_5_2000.html>.
Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic
Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Wanda J. Orlikowski, Learning from Notes: Organizational issues in
groupware implementation, The Information Society 9(3), 1993, pages
237-250.
Jerome W. Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David D. Clark, End-to-end
arguments in system design, ACM Transactions in Computer Systems 2(4),
1984, pages 277-288.
Clay Shirky, Listening to Napster, in Andy Oram, ed, Peer-to-Peer:
Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, O'Reilly, 2001.
end
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