Peer-to-Peer and the Promise of Internet Equality
Technologies often come wrapped in stories about politics. These stories may not explain the motives of the technologists, but they do often explain the social energy that propels the technology into the larger world. In the case of peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies, the official engineering story is that computational effort should be distributed to reflect the structure of the problem. But the engineering story does not explain the strong feelings that P2P often evokes. The strong feelings derive from a political story, often heatedly disavowed by technologists but widespread in the culture: that P2P delivers on the Internet’s promise of decentralization. By minimizing the role of centralized computing elements, the story goes, P2P systems will be immune to censorship, monopoly, regulation, and other exercises of centralized authority.
Although some professions grew slowly from medieval guilds, the great explosion of new professions around 1900 was facilitated by new communications and transportation infrastructures. These new infrastructures created economies of scale in the production and distribution of industrial goods, thus permitting the rise of large corporations and the division of intellectual labor that made professional specialization possible. They also supported professionals in organizing societies, editing and distributing publications, traveling to conferences, and so on. In fact, the first modern professions were organized by railroad workers, who pioneered the use of the new infrastructures (Chandler 1977). Numerous other professional groups followed soon afterward.
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 professionals rather than through the speculative chaos of the market.
Because Veblen advocated neither capitalism nor socialism, he is usually regarded as an outlier in political history. Yet the Internet is making Veblen’s theory more relevant than ever. Because 20th century infrastructures were so cumbersome, only a small portion of the population could use them to organize professions, and the organizations that resulted were bureaucratic. Numerous social groups, however, now use the Internet to hold discussions, edit publications, organize meetings, and build social networks. As new service layers are added to the Internet, a complex array of architectures and institutions will become available to everyone. Some of these may resemble the professions of Veblen’s day, but they might also support collective learning in other ways.
Friedrich Hayek was an Austrian economist who provided 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 (Hayek 1963).
Hayek’s work, like Veblen’s, challenges us to understand what a “center” is. Observe, for example, that institutions, like architectures, are often organized in layers. Legislatures and courts are institutional layers that create other institutions, namely laws, that rest upon them. Law itself has layers; contract law is a layer, and so are individual contracts. The architecture of the Internet is also organized in layers. Do the more basic layers of institution and architecture 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.
Consider the case of the Internet. Despite its reputation as a model of decentralization, its institutions and architecture nonetheless have many centralized aspects, including the DNS and Microsoft’s control over desktop software. The IETF is less centralized than most standards organizations, but it is still a center. Let us consider one aspect of the Internet: the end-to-end arguments (Saltzer, Reed, and Clark 1984), which move complexity out of the network and into the hosts that use it. This approach maximizes flexibility: each layer in the Internet protocol stack is defined in a general way, and end-users can create new layers atop the old ones. But it also shifts complexity away from the centralized expertise of network engineers, placing it instead on the desktops of the 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, authentication and filtering mechanisms, firewalls, and so on. The peer-to-peer character of the TCP/IP protocols has remained much the same; the reshuffling takes place mostly on other layers. Thus, a decentralized network can support centralized services, or vice versa. For example, the asymmetrical client-server architecture of the Web sits atop the symmetrical architecture of the Internet.
In moving toward a decentralized ideal, the P2P movement must confront the types of centralization that are inherent in certain applications (e.g., O’Reilly 2001: 50). For example, if users contend for the same physical resource, some kind of global lock is needed. Most markets have this property (Shirky 2001: 28). Some mechanisms do exist for sharing a resource without an architecturally centralized lock, such as the backoff algorithms of Ethernet and TCP. Complete centralization is not the only option. Still, 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.
For Douglass North (1990: 3), an institution can be understood by analogy to the rules of a game. An institution, in this sense, is conceptual structure that allows people to coordinate their activities. In particular, it creates incentives, such as the profit motive, that tend to channel participants’ actions.
For North, “institutions” do not imply the top-down imposition of inflexible rules. “Institutions” does not mean “organizations”. Quite the contrary, institutions are distributed throughout the whole population. Banks, for instance, are organizations, but the institution of banking includes everybody who has a bank account. The institution is a web of relationships, including all of the customs, skills, and strategies that weave the web together. The motor of institutional evolution is not efficiency but self-interest. To understand how institutions evolve, one must analyze the players and their strategies. But even when a single player is powerful enough to constitute a “center”, it has its effects only by interacting with the interests and strategies of the other players.