What is P2P and why is it the best and worse thing to happen to the Internet

I live on the west coast and I subscribe to the New York Times as do thousands of others around me. Imagine for a moment that every night the paper was printed in New York, loaded onto a truck (along with the papers for everyone else) and they were all sent out onto the highway. The Times would need to have thousand and thousands of trucks and they would need to have huge highways into and out of their facility to accomodate all that traffic. The costs would be enormous and the chances of getting my paper to me on time would be low (lots of delays because of traffic congestion, failures and such).

People who know how these papers work know that instead, one electronic copy of that paper is sent to a local printer in Washington and thousands of copies are printed locally and delivered to homes quickly. This model also exists on the internet today and is called the "Content Distribution Network" model. When you watch that youtube video or download that iTunes music, you are actually retrieving a copy that is stored on a server that may be very close to you, This saves all kinds of bandwidth and is a necessecity for those companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple and others who send lots of data. The comanies who provide this service are wildly profitable and get away with charging alot for their services. Yesterday one of these companies (Limelight Networks) went public and their stock was bid up almost double in the first hours of trading.

Returning to the newspaper analogy for a minute, suppose all of us and our neighbors had a printing press in our houses and were able to download and print the Times. While we were doing this, our neighbors were also downloading the paper. If we knew we needed the sports and business section, and our neighbor had them, it would be much better for us to get those sections from them rather than downloading them from a server far away. Imagine we has hudreds of neighbors all offering a page of the paper as soon as they get it, and you will begin to understand Peer to Peer (or P2P). Today this technology is wildly popular among the music and video sharing folks. If you connect to the "bittorrent" P2P network, you can download virtually any music, TV, Movie or software you can imagine. These files are all stored on your neighbors coputers and you pull a small bit from each of them. Sharing uses a small bit of their network connection in the "up" direction, but most of us use very little of that bandwidth today; if you are like me, the only up traffic is the clicks you make to request web pages and the emails you send out. All the other traffic is in the down direction.

Today, P2P protocols are uncrontrolled and you don't really share only with your close neighbors... you are sharing with a vast group of "neighbors" all over the world. The result is that traffic doesn't stay in your neighborhood, but it bounces all across the network. According to studies, almost 60% of the traffic on the Internet backbone trunks is P2P file sharing, and most of that is video. This is more than all the email and web browsing traffic combined! And this is really being generated by a small set of the Internet users (i.e. Bittorrent users). Imagine what the world looks like when the old folks start using P2P.... the net will be crushed.

What is needed is a managed P2P that can ensure that local traffic is really delivered locally. It would also be great if the applications could make effective use of their neighbors to ensure fast reliable delivery. Add onto that the ability for content producers to protect their content (i.e. you can't share that movie you bought with someone who didn't buy it), support realtime live video and the ability to insert targeted ads and you'll see what Rinera Networks is setting out to build.