A Deeper Look Inside The Rabbit Hole of Utopia — PART III
In Part II we reviewed the heyday of the BBS (Bulletin Board Service) as well as Internet Relay Chat (IRC). In Part III we will focus on the revolutionary changes that came about in the way people shared content and the consequences of those changes. In early 1999, Napster was launched by teenagers who had met each other on a BBS related to hacking by some accounts, and IRC by others. Their goal was clear; make sharing music over the internet easy. Their software utilized Peer-to-Peer technology and took off like wildfire. The growth of their service was explosive even by today’s standards and helped popularize the term “downloading” in many households. At its height, Napster was utilized by more than 70 million users. The calendar year did not close before the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) filed suit on behalf of all five major music labels on December 6, 1999. Eventually the court ordered Napster to pull down all copyright-infringing material and being unable to fully do so, the company shutdown its service on July 1, 2001.
Analysis: The founders of Napster, seeking eventual traditional profits from their service, incorporated the company and in so doing, painted a legal bullseye on their backs for vested interests to target. In legal discovery, communications from one of the founders highlighted a kind of complicity with the copyright-infringement that was rampant on their service. Furthermore, while their software had elements of Peer-to-Peer technology, in that users could share their own content and download from others, the network resources were fully centralized, enabling Napster engineers to attempt to execute the court order and purge their service of infringing content before eventually shutting down. Ultimately, Napster failed because their technology was not fully decentralized, not fully Peer-to-Peer, they exhibited central chokepoints from both a legal and technical perspective.
On July 2, 2001, literally a single day after the Napster central servers were shutdown for good, the first publically available version of the BitTorrent protocol went live. In every way which Napster exhibited fatal flaws during its less than 3 year run, BitTorrent carried the torch with a firmer grip and a longer stride. First, it was an independent and content-agnostic protocol, free from any of the copyright-infringing baggage that the billions and billions of files that would soon be shared using it would carry. Second, it harnessed the awesome power of genuine Peer-to-Peer technology, as “seeders” and “leechers” of files would testify, the bandwidth came from the users themselves, no central servers to target, no central chokepoint to take down. Within 10 years of its release, some reports had BitTorrent traffic representing fully more than half of all internet bandwidth at any given moment in time. The term BitTorrent has become inextricably linked with Peer-to-Peer technology itself and many technically inclined internet users of a certain age, this author included, will lecture you about how the internet simply would not be the same today without the power of BitTorrent.
Think for just a moment how dreadful a place the internet would be if information itself, of a relatively high quality, were not so freely available with a few searches and a little effort. What if when you searched about the “Gulf of Tonkin incident” because you heard that perhaps Vietnam didn’t start the war with the United States, you came across a paywall and were asked to pay $9.99 to learn the historical truth. Just imagine if you decided to research the “USS Liberty incident” because you heard reports that the Israeli military misidentifying the ship as Eqyptian and killing 34 Americans were complete fabrications and Israel knew exactly who it was targeting on that day, but found that reports and in-depth analysis of the events of that day were simply unavailable online because such information was locked up in the vaults of a private corporation and not for sale or distribution.
Can you imagine such an internet for a single moment?
That is how the internet would be with respect to content (Video, Audio, Games, Books) if BitTorrent did not exist. It would be full of holes, paywalls, and dead ends. BitTorrent, and the democratizing nature of content and content distribution represents the very best of the internet in that era. What would happen if this kind of democratizing power were projected unto money itself? That will be the focus of Part IV; the rise of Bitcoin.
Originally Published By TheMerchant in TheMessage within the Utopia P2P Ecosystem in February of 2020. Upgrade your internet at https://u.is
