Ian Clarke on Peer-to-Peer

Simone of O'Reilly writes "On Freenet, the more popular information gets, the more copies it generates--and the easier it is to find and download. That's just one significant feature of this promising peer-to-peer network. Freenet inventor Ian Clarke may not be talking about his new company, Uprizer, but he has a lot to say about how decentralized architectures can fix what ails the Internet. Here's the interview." We've heard from Clarke before, but this is an interesting piece.

Comments

What Ian doesn't get

[joshv]

Ian wants to basically replace the web with freenet and has said as much. But what he doesn't get is that he is not going to replace the web as we know it with static documents (which is all freenet serves up).

Come on, how could a web site like slashdot possibily exist in freenet? It couldn't. It is simply too dynamic, too frequently updated, and reliant on a coherent and consistent database of comments and articles that simply cannot exist in a distributed network.

Freenet will be a boon for the archival of static and infrequently updated content and web sites, but for anything more dynamic, freenet fails to offer a solution - and as such will nicely complement, but never replace the web.

-josh