P2P vs centralized ≈ or != Apps vs the browser?

A very interesting thread on p2p and decentralisation is going on at the Decentralisation List. Phil Wolff sums up nicely. People like Clay Shirky have contributed with very informed comments on the current state of p2p. The discussion mostly revolves around p2p and why it isn’t dominating today to the extent many thought it would five years ago. I’ve been thinking a little bit about these things lately and so I made a little post with a few questions to the list. A copy of the post is here:

Very interesting thread here, and many great comments on p2p.

My question would be: Will media-intensive, advertising-driven business models like Joost and Spotify (similar to Joost, but for music) prevail in the near future or will browser-based centralized services make for too hard competition (tv-links.co.uk, last.fm, etc)? Bandwidth is still not very cheap when you push 100:s of TB:s/day — and the service with the least intrusive ads wins the users in the long run, right? So from an economics standpoint–disregarding the fact that people have to download specific app:s rather than simply use the browser, etc–p2p wins in these cases, no?

From a UI point of view however, technologies like Flash (latest) and Silverlight provide all components necessary to replicate the UI:s of the above-mentioned p2p services (full-screen mode is the latest addition). The only thing they can’t do is save bandwidth costs through p2p-caching. If they could, p2p would probably be used *a lot* more than it is today.

So wouldn’t a solution here be to have a generalized p2p caching layer in the browser (with proper domain-based privacy levels, etc)? It could be based on bittorrent or a similar technology, but would have to be further abstracted and transparent in order to be user-friendly enough to compete wt existing services. Maybe the WHAT-WG and/or W3C is already thinking about this? It would certainly help the 20-something-kids-on-rails..

Or will CDN:s be able to further lower prices by pushing their architectures in some new way? The same goes for storage (S3 is setting a new standard here, but is still centralized).

So the second question is then: Isn’t the “failure” of p2p adoption really more a question of the browser increasingly becoming the dominant UI paradigm vs. the older, separate apps/desktop paradigm–in effect preventing a higher use of p2p-technology?

Regards,
Eric

 May 9th, 2007