these caching systems can deliver content more efficiently -- more cheaply
and more quickly. The speed and reliability of streaming technology using
peer-to-peer technologies are significantly increased.

So too is the intelligence. Consider Gnutella. Gnutella is best known as
an alternative to Napster. Rather than relying upon a centralized server to
keep the list of which users have which files, Gnutella uses a peer-to-peer
querying algorithm, which makes the central server unnecessary. This
means that it is much harder to control the content that gets exchanged in
a Gnutella system. And this means in turn that Gnutella so far has been
used to facilitate the exchange of a wide range of content too dangerous to
post on the Web.

But the real value to Gnutella is not this ability to exchange questionable
content. The real potential is for Gnutella to expand the power of searching
technologies beyond their presently limited scope. Search engines today
miss an increasingly large proportion of the Internet. The engines were ini-
tially designed to index static Web pages. As more and more of the Net be-
comes dynamic (meaning the content displayed is generated each time a
Web page request is made), the search engines miss this content.

The Gnutella technology suggests a way around this limitation. By en-
abling a more sophisticated language with which to relay requests to end de-
vices, Gnutella would make it possible for a search to be launched on the
Internet, in which individual machines within the Gnutella network pro-
cess that search however they think best. As Andy Oram describes it:

____ Gnutella offers the path forward. It governs how sites exchange informa-
____ tion, but says nothing about what each site does with the information. A
____ site can plug the user's search string into a database query or perform any
____ other processing it finds useful. Search engines adapted to use Gnutella
____ would thus become the union of all searches provided by all sites. A
____ merger of the most advanced technologies available (standard formats like
____ XML for data exchange, database-driven content provision, and distrib-
____ uted computing) could take the Internet to new levels.[8-32]

This is innovation at the edge of the Internet that implicates its core func-
tionality. It would radically advance the function of the Net, moving the Net
from its costly, centralized server architecture to a more distributed and
flexible architecture.

These peer-to-peer innovations are enabled by the commons at the code
layer. And indeed, the strongest complaint against them is that some of

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v?