Are P2P Technologies Really P2P?

Is “The Public” of Tomorrow Going To Be a Network?
Or: How Significant Are P2P Technologies?
December 22, 2007
Revised From: May 8, 2007

Some contend that the emerging peer-to-peer networked public sphere differs from the mass mediated public sphere. While this certainly is the case to an extent, it nevertheless does not take into account discussions by Phil Agre and Yochai Benkler that, although peer-to-peer technologies are emerging, there nevertheless remain strong forces assert the power of broadcast media and traditional proprietary models. How significant can this transformation be when the peer-to-peer network technologies are themselves mediated by monopolies such as Microsoft, SBC-Yahoo, Google, Comcast, and Apple? To further complicate matters, it is difficult to say when the period of the “mass mediated public sphere” begins. Why do we regard the “preceding era” as mass mediated, when, after all, broadcast television is itself regarded as a “network”? Why do we refer to some technologies as “peer-to-peer” when the users operating them are not necessarily peers? Perhaps both the future and the past are murkier than they may appear. The significance of new technologies like MySpace, Facebook, Blogs, File-sharing Programs, etc do not implicitly change anything in particular.

In 2003, when Phil Agre wrote P2P and the Promise of Internet Equality, he was still living in the cusp of the transformation to the music industry the full force of which is only recently being received. He argued:

The post-Napster institutions of music distribution will presumably depend on new technologies. At the moment, most technical development is aimed at two models: P2P models that resist legal assaults and rights-management models that preserve existing economic models or migrate toward subscription models. It is unclear whether a thoroughly P2P architecture can survive, particularly if monopolies such as Microsoft change their own architectures to suit the record companies' needs.

Over time, we have seen the relative success of both models, but not necessarily through the means that Agre predicted. Over the past few years, the market has finally seen the theorized decline of record sales, but not because of P2P models: instead, because of iTunes, and other models. iTunes and similar programs allow artists to have guaranteed revenue that’s directly reflective of their sales, it co-opts many of the most successful artists that otherwise would be attracted to P2P models by allowing them to release their music digitally, but through a media formation that is more broadcast in origin than P2P. One might argue that through programs like iTunes, the artists win: they can sell their records without having to work through a traditional record label. But on the other hand, iTunes has merely become the record label of all those artists that use their services. iTunes isn’t a P2P model. Like Microsoft, Apple has become a powerful center of information technology. Agre suggested that Microsoft might change its structure to suit producers’ needs. Instead, Apple changed its structure to suit artists needs, and in doing so Apple guaranteed that music will continue to be mediated by proprietary models.
Agre’s predictions captured many points of what would come to be. However, Benkler’s discussion in The Wealth of Networks may ultimately be more relevant. Peer-to-peer technologies are challenging traditional proprietary models of intellectual property, Benkler’s arguments explain, but they are now the subject of a legal backlash. As Benkler explains,

…the DMCA and the continued dominance of Microsoft over the desktop, and the willingness of courts and legislatures to try to stamp out copyright-defeating technologies even when these obviously have significant benefits to users who have no interest in copying the latest song in order not to pay for the CD-are the primary sources of institutional constraint on the freedom to use the logical resources necessary to communicate in the network.

Not only Microsoft and the DMCA, but other monopolies or near-monopolies, such as Disney, continue to fight for longer copyrights and more trademarks. New biotechnologies continue to expand traditional perceptions of what can be the subject of a patent, now including chemicals and elements produced by the human body. Traditional proprietary models, based on exclusive intellectual property rights, continue to lobby major governments to illegalize network models, and sometimes use guerilla tactics to attack network models directly. In one regard, one has to accept that a completely open peer-to-peer technology is completely open to attack, when those who are actively attacking peer-to-peer technologies can gain access just as easily as the creator of peer-to-peer technologies, or the average user interested in looking around to see what’s offered. One has to ask when this is the case: what really constitutes a peer?

Even Benkler has to discuss the illegal activities of millions of the people using peer-to-peer technologies. Certainly the backlash against peer-to-peer technologies, starting with Napster, originates in the threat traditional models sensed; the threat that the users illegally trading music would lower record sales. Few answers exist to understand why so many users of peer-to-peer technologies now associate with criminality. Further, monopolies offer few answers as to why old methods of broadcasting information for limited or indirect profit, such as broadcast radio, did not cause record labels to worry that their music was being “stolen”. As Benkler argues that, “Music, like all information, is a nonrival public good whose marginal cost, once produced, is zero.” If this was all there was to the case, then the illegal users of peer-to-peer technologies really never had any excuse.

Failure to understand the illegal users of peer-to-peer technologies is rooted in the failure of many to understand peer-to-peer technologies at all. As they are, peer-to-peer technologies are wholly rooted in a multitude of expensive products whose sale is largely dominated by several monopolies and major international corporations. Benkler was right: once produced, music has little cost to reproduce. However, the cost of production can be extraordinary. The ownership of a computer, the technologies (like Microsoft’s Windows), the specialized information-producing technologies, and the instruments necessary will rarely cost, combined, less than several thousand dollars. Following this, there are the most important costs: the time, talent, creativity, and energy required to produce information technologies. In the time it takes an individual to produce one piece of music, they could download a thousand songs. In the time it would take to produce one full length movie, they could download a hundred films at least. To produce a film and share it on a P2P network, a user would require a camera: to own a competitive model, they might want to go for a something like a “Canon XL1 Digital Camcorder Kit”—cost on Amazon, $2,500. That’s $2,500—paid to a different major corporation, Canon. Once a film is made, it is then converted to a different digital format on a computer (perhaps run off a desktop like Microsoft’s Windows). That desktop software is then connected to the Internet—powered by either SBC-Yahoo or Comcast in all likelihood—and then connected to be shared for no immediate financial return on a P2P sharing site. To produce music, there are different monopolies and major corporations one must instead pay. And even then, to access some networks, one might need a portfolio.

If an extra $2,500 was a requirement for every community, then the world would be filled with countless lone individuals. It is not surprising then, that those that are regarded as the most “successful peer-to-peer” technologies are those that demand the least in terms of “sharing” original content. Networks such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Blogs can be accessed by almost anyone and demand almost nothing. All the content is either already present or can be offered with very little cost of either time or money. Yet these networks nonetheless aren’t always P2P technologies. MySpace and Facebook are both owned by individuals, and can be sold—and completely deleted—at will. YouTube is more of a P2P form than those others, but it nevertheless is the subject of countless attacks by major corporations and the government, demanding that songs be removed, that movies be removed if they use songs or clips of popular movies, or music videos. Most of the “Peers” on a sight of YouTube do not have the money, the time, the energy, or the talent to compete with the media distributed by broadcast media. Instead, the most popular members of YouTube are those who use cheap webcams or podcasts to convey essentially the same information as that of a post on LiveJournal. If this is the freedom promised by some, then it is an awfully limited freedom—and hardly utopian.

Perhaps the “real” P2P formations were those that existed beforehand in Broadcast media: those who work to produce the News for CBS may all work for a major corporation, and once hired, they may very well be Peers: by working for the same corporation, they know who each other are, and what they can produce. If they lack sufficient production, then they are fired. But those who work for the major corporation have guaranteed pay, whereas those who work for the Peer-to-Peer community may receive very little in return. The risk remains that those with the most interest in developing professional, competitive products will often be drawn toward the major corporations and monopolies for guaranteed returns—thus lowering the amount of quality original content on Peer-to-Peer networks. So what are P2P technologies left with? Millions of people without the means or energy to produce content joining P2P networks consisting of millions of other people without the means or energy to produce content: the only content available being that produced by major corporations.

So is there an emerging Peer-to-Peer network sphere? Communities such as YouTube and MySpace are still owned by individuals; although their content may be generated by individuals, they are not implicitly more or less “Peer-to-Peer” than the Networks of Broadcast Media, and the continued thriving of Networks undermine P2P Networks at least, if not more, than the P2P Networks undermine the Broadcast Media. And there is no end to mediation, in any sphere.