Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Rise of the DarkNets
The New York Times has a really interesting article today on several parallel projects to create clients for encrypted, privacy-concious peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing...
For the most part, these new software tools are accelerating their work in response to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision (full text) in the MGM Studios vs. Grokster case. The emerging name for encrypted p2p networks is "darknets".
I've been thinking about the potential for darknets ever since Napster was shut down and the current generation of decentralized p2p networks (Gnutella/Edonkey/FastTrack) quickly emerged. Their fundamental innovation was to replace Napster's centralized file directory with a more decentralized system of nodes and supernodes. But as the Grokster case has shown, there are still ways for the music and film industry to go after key parts of this infrastructure (mainly the software). BitTorrent took things a step further, but it still requires a place to exchange torrent files - the tracking sites like SuperNova and TVTorrents that have been shut down rather easily.
Somewhere along the line, Waste was released by a disgruntled AOL employee and I started to see where this was all going - towards private, trust-based encrypted file sharing for small social groups. What I never understood was why the music industry didn't see that every time they tried to quash file-sharing networks, the technology would morph to create a new network infrastructure - in essence the industry has mimicked the war or drugs and turned was once an open activity into a clandestine underground that is very difficult to track.
An interesting side effect is that these new tools are now making it very easy for anyone to create clandestine communications networks for multimedia distribution. From Al Qaeda to Chinese dissidents. Brave New World!
The whole business makes me think of IFTF co-founder Paul Baran's famous diagram of distributed networks. The RIAA/MGM's campaign against file sharing has pushed us into more and more complex network architectures - I suspect at some point, these networks will disappear into the white noise of network traffic entirely - encrypted, anonymous, and closed to those outside the circle of trust. There will be no one left to sue but the ISPs.
Imagine Verizon vs RIAA!