The Tragedy of the Digital Commons

Frog writes "The New York Times (reg. req'd) writes about a study by the Xerox PARC Internet Ecologies Area which shows that only a small percentage of Gnutella users actually share files -- the rest just take 'em. The researchers note it's 'hard to generate spontaneous cooperation in large anonymous groups.' As a consequence, the system has degraded performance, and is more vulnerable to censorship or legal action. Maybe the solution is to implement a market system for resource allocation, but how to prevent cheating?" Reminds me of the BBS days of file ratios - 'course then we'd just take an image, resize and upload it, so that idea didn't exactly work as intended.

Comments

Slow connection makes sharing hard

[cs668]

I think that faster net access would make it easier to share data instead of just downloading it.

My connection is slow enough that I can not share anything, but I would if I had DSL or Cablemodem access.

This might be a solution.

[Apuleius]

Mojonation seems to address this problem. From their site:

Micropayments and Scalability Mojo Nation compensates users who provide the resources, content, and indexing services. Effectively preventing cheating, denial of service, and freeloading, Mojo Nation fosters an information market for all types of content. This is accomplished through a micropayment system which denominates the internal tokens, called Mojo, in the same resources needed to provide the services: disk space, bandwidth, and CPU cycles. In time you will be able to buy and sell these tokens, turning Mojo your earn into real dollars.

Of course, I've yet to use Napster or Gnutella, so who knows. But this thing gives you incentive to give as well as take.

NOT a tragedy, just another Keg party.

[tylerh]

Programmers know this as the "90/10" rule: 90% of the useful work will be done by 10% of the code

This applies to people as well. I helped organize keggers in college. A small number of us did the organizing/financing/clean up -- everyone else just showed up and partied. That was kind of the whole point. So this "ecology" result is NOT a tragedy of the commons, it' just a another keg party - and you know how hard those are to stop 8)

GO GNUTELLA

Money and trust

[raph]

There are two solutions, I think, to the tragedy of the commons. One is to pay people for their disk space and bandwidth. As several other comments have pointed out, this is exactly what Mojo Nation does, using "mojo" micropayment tokens as the currency. I've been playing with it, and though it's been a bumpy ride, it looks very promising. Check it out.

There is another solution, I think, which is using trust to define a community. The set of "Gnutella users" is too large and diffuse to actually define a community. Why should I donate my bandwidth for other people who I don't know and don't really care about?

If, on the other hand, I were sharing files with a much smaller group of people, many of whom I know personally, then it starts feeling more like a community. Of course I want my friends to be able to listen to the music I like.

I propose that the trust system as deployed on Advogato might be a good way to define these communities. Of course, I might be totally wrong about this as well. Only one way to find out :)

Incidentally, the way Mojo Nation is set up right now, it still has Tragedy of the Commons problems. Currently, you don't get mojo for uploading tasty content. In fact, you actually have to pay for the privilege. However, when you share a file, it's not a continual drain on your bandwidth (or diskspace, fwiw). The actual distribution is handled by "block servers", who do charge for their services.

Of course, the Mojo economy is still in its formative stages. I hope, and expect, that actual markets will develop for providing and identifying tasty content.

In any case, file sharing sure promises to be an interesting ride.

Marxist Leeching

[angst_ridden_hipster]

We used to paraphrase Marx's

"From each according to his ability,
to each according to his need."

into

"From each according to their assets,
to each according to their greed."

Of course, this was in our godless commie Warez swappin' Hotline-usin' phase...

In the long run, it's OK. There are 90% leeches. But the 10% who make up the providers is not always the same 10% of the people. Today's leech is tomorrow's provider, and vice versa. Sometimes.
It all tends to work out eventually.
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bukra fil mish mish
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Monitor the Web, or Track your site!

Stealing the Web

[TrumpetPower!]

And, in a related and equally shocking development, other researchers discovered that 99% of people using the World Wide Web don't themselves create web pages but only view them. There can be only one result of this vast and tragically unballanced sucking of vital computer resources: the Imminent Death of the Internet.

b&

Uh oh, it's Huberman again

[Animats]

This article is more hype from Bernardo Huberman at PARC. Huberman is an economist of the libertarian persuasion. His answer to all problems is a market, as becomes obvious when you read his papers. His libertarian bias is so strong that he's written some very bad papers. Worse, some of them have been distributed widely because they said some things some major players wanted to hear, such as his claim that per-packet charging on the Internet was inevitable.

(This happens to bug me personally because he claims to have been the first to observe that the tragedy of the commons problem applies to Internet congestion. He wasn't; I was, in 1985. See RFC970)

As a previous poster noted, the default with Gnutella is not to share anything. That's why so few share. This isn't rocket science.