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----- {{llfoip134.png}} || Lawrence Lessig ||


bought book X also bought book Y. And just as the invention of a new ma-
chine can in turn reduce the cost of some production process, the ability to
capture and use this new resource will reduce the costs of advertising dra-
matically. Rather than technologies that produce 0.5 percent return,[8-23] these
technologies will produce a much greater return at a lower cost.[8-24]

Thus the architecture of the Net enables a resource otherwise unavail-
able. And through this resource, a barrier to entry is reduced. For if one of
the hardest parts of breaking into music is the cost of promotion, then as
long as these data mines remain competitive, lowering the cost of promo-
tion will make it easier to break into music. The same is true with books or
any other content. By increasing the demand for a diverse selection of con-
tent, and by enabling the cheaper identification of that demand, the Net
widens the range of potential contributors.


/tab\/tab\NEW PARTICIPATION: P2P/tab\/tab\

Finally, consider an innovation that enables a new kind of participa-
tion that many have called the next great revolution for the Internet, and
that in light of our discussion of e2e will be quite familiar: the emergence of
peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.[8-25]

A peer-to-peer network is one where the content is being served not by a
single central server, but by equal, or "peer," machines linked across the
network. Formally, "p2p is a class of applications that take advantage of
resources -- storage, cycles, content, human presence -- available at the
edges of the Internet."[8-26] In the sense I've described, this was the architecture
of the original computers on the Internet -- there wasn't a set of central
servers that the machines connected to; instead, there was a set of e2e pro-
tocols that enabled data to be shared among the machines.

But as commerce came to the Net, the character of this architecture
changed. As the World Wide Web became more popular, Web servers be-
came dominant. And as servers grew, the equal peer-to-peer structure of the
Internet was replaced by the hierarchical structures of client and server.

This was not intended. When Berners-Lee invented the World Wide
Web, he didn't really have in mind centralized Web servers broadcasting
tons of content to the many; from the very start, he tried to push developers
of browsers to develop them as two-way devices -- allowing both the viewing
and the writing of HTML code. Berners-Lee wanted a peer-to-peer Web,
and his technology enabled that. But in the first generation of its deploy-


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