FC: Xerox PARC study says Gnutella suffers from tragedy of commons

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[This is an interesting article. It reminds me of pirate BBSs in the 1980s, 
which tried to guard against this problem with clunky upload/download 
ratios. (Yes, I ran a BBS on an Apple IIe and then a IIgs about 14 years 
ago.) We even had a term for habitual download-only users: Leeches. The 
authors say: "Another possible solution to this problem is the 
transformation of what is effectively a public good into a private one. 
This can be accomplished by setting up a market based architecture that 
allows peers to buy and sell computer processing resources..." In other 
words, inject market mechanisms into the file-sharing economy, which is 
precisely what MojoNation tries to do: 
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,37892,00.html The authors don't 
mention MojoNation, but I assume that's because the paper was largely 
complete at the time of its recent introduction. --Declan]



http://www.parc.xerox.com/istl/groups/iea/papers/gnutella/

  Free Riding on Gnutella
  Eytan Adar and Bernardo A. Huberman
  Internet Ecologies Area
  Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
  Palo Alto, CA 94304

  An extensive analysis of user traffic on Gnutella shows a
  significant amount of free riding in the system. By sampling
  messages on the Gnutella network over a 24-hour period, we
  established that 70% of Gnutella users share no files, and 90% of
  the users answer no queries. Furthermore, we found out that free
  riding is distributed evenly between domains, so that no one
  group contributes significantly more than others, and that peers
  that volunteer to share files are not necessarily those who have
  desirable ones. We argue that free riding leads to degradation of
  the system performance and adds vulnerability to the system. If
  this trend continues copyright issues might become moot
  compared to the possible collapse of such systems.