The problem with P2P

摘要

For those in the tech or telecom sectors, peer-to-peer computing is clever but hardly remarkable. P2P is all about increasingly-gutsy clients challenging the dominance of the mainframe or switch. If the entire story of the Internet could be put in a sen-tence, that's about it. We know this has impacted massively on the telecoms business; telco engineers are no longer the lords of the network as they once were. But it's also disrupted innumerable other parts of the economy. The government, education, news media, travel, logistics and retail sectors, just to name a few, have had to endure the wrenching changes wrought by the Net. They've learnt to deal with radically different information flows and to create different relationships with their customers, clients and suppliers.