Peer to Peer: Collaboration and Sharing over the Internet

Chapter 13. In a Screen Darkly

In this final chapter, we take out and dust off the crystal ball to discern where the current trends and ideas might lead. The view is necessarily dark, misty and unclear, both because of the difficulty in predicting which way critical events might go and because of the state of flux in which the entire field—for that matter, the entire world—finds itself.

Some of these imponderables have been touched on in earlier chapters. We however can’t predict very well which technologies will “take off” and which will fall by the wayside. Nobody predicted, for example, the intense popularity of messaging or file sharing, although in hindsight, the development seems inevitable. Future changes in Internet infrastructure and ...