Peer to Peer: Collaboration and Sharing over the Internet

Chapter 11. Peering Insights

I readily admit that this book is flawed. Any book on a subject as rapidly evolving and controversial as peer to peer and with as ill-defined scope as in this term will inevitably be both incomplete and unsatisfying to at least some readers. On the other hand, an attempt at greater coverage could easily have resulted in something approaching Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—which empire, interestingly, exhibited several characteristics common to p2p models during several periods of its existence.

Although the selection of technologies and choice of perspective could have been made in other ways, with perhaps equal success in satisfying a reasonable portion of readers, I would be remiss ...