The masters of serendipitous eclectica over at Boing Boing are pondering how to deal with the bandwidth bills resulting from their inorexible success. Indeed, I occasionally live in fear of a sudden overage bill if this site suddenly got a spike of visitors (I should be so lucky) or suffered a denial of service attack.
The answer is simple in theory if somewhat hard to implement in reality. Don’t centralize what doesn’t need to be centralized. Boing Boing is a “bag of bits” website, where the only interative feature is the search function. We need to start thinking of how to re-wire the web into a peer-to-peer architecture. Don’t store static data centrally. Just store the pointers who who might have a list of where it is (a-la Napster mk1 or BitTorrent).
Of course, Boing Boing can’t alone be expected to change the world this much. But you can’t escape the cold clutch of economics. If the only way of getting your message out is to reinvent the web, so be it. I can imagine a day in the not too distant future where your visit to a website returns a lightweight page like this:
We’re sorry, but we have reached our monthly bandwidth charge cap and your user agent “Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0” does not support distributed web page delivery. May we suggest you upgrade to one of the following products…
The interesting thing about BitTorrent is the algorithm by which download speed is coupled to the uploads you’ve made available. No free riding, folks. Applied more broadly, this would greatly discourage the use of dynamic IP addresses (which make acting as a server awkward), NAT devices (hard), and firewalls (impossible). Worried about the balkanization of the Internet? Then just set up the technology so the economics are in your favor.
I bet someone is already working on peer-to-peer locally cached web delivery. (If not, I want credit on your patent application.) Anyone want to enlighten me?
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:32 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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