Why the P2P network paradigm is important for legitimate businesses

While P2P networks are often dismissed as tools of a criminal, they can often serve the interests of legitimate businesses to the benefit of everyone.

It is no doubt that P2P networks are disruptive when designed correctly. BitTorrent, Bitcoin, Tor — they are all examples of designs using the P2P paradigm to disrupt the status quo of areas like content distribution, finance and online anonymity. The unregulated nature of these networks is very often criticised for facilitating activity deemed as illegal — and it is of no doubt that this is true. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is a quote from the NRA that I always think of in these situations — a tool is simply a tool, what it is used for is what matters.

However they can serve quite legitimate interests for businesses looking to complement their existing centralized architecture. Peer-to-peer networks can offer many benefits over centralized client-server architectures, including increased reliability and scalability of the system as a result of its decentralization and load distribution from the network of peers. For example, there have been several very successful internet companies which have been founded on P2P technology:

• Skype previously used a P2P architecture to connect users across the world through firewalls and NATs, such that they were able to focus on providing a great and always available service, instead of spending money on hosting servers.
• Spotify also uses a P2P architecture to offload the streaming of music to their peers, which facilitated a quicker and more reliable service for its users through many more servers (peers) located closer to users. This not only complemented their own centralized servers, it played the major role — in 2011, 35% of queries for music were answered by the P2P network, compared to 8% answered by Spotify servers.

These examples illustrate why P2P is a paradigm not to be overlooked in any internet business. One of the core concepts of why Internet businesses are so successful is that they can be scaled very easily, and with P2P technology it only becomes cheaper. Whether it be through apps or web-based services (using WebRTC), P2P is here to stay.

Coming up next in my series on P2P Innovation — an exploration of an innovative new P2P publish-subscribe network design called PolderCast and its applications.

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