What I liked about the Open Handset Alliance’s Android plans was

Android’s developers envision a world where today’s integrated wireless systems are reduced to a set of relationships between parts that are more or less interchangeable. Consumers will be free to load their phones with applications of their own choosing–free applications, applications available for sale, and custom applications developed by enterprises for their employees. These applications will be able to communicate with third-party services offered over the Internet–using any available communications pipe, be it the cellular network, a nearby Wi-Fi connection, or even a Bluetooth connection from another phone.

and

If Android succeeds, it will have a major impact on wireless carriers. A phone running Google’s component-based operating system, after all, would treat wireless operators like Verizon and AT&T as just another way to reach data services on the Internet. Such a phone could turn today’s wireless providers into commodity data communications networks that also happen to carry voice.

and

Just as Google’s place in the wireless world is a work in progress, so too is Android, which I suspect will not be limited to cell phones. If it’s successful, we’re likely to see Android as the basis of other handheld devices: digital cameras, GPS receivers, or even lightweight tablet computers.

It wouldn’t seem a big step from there to postulating interconnectivity between cell phones (and similar devices) that could form the basis of a ‘Peernet’ infrastructure.

After all, our use of the Internet and the Web has been riding on the coattails of others for a long time. The first interconnectivity of computers was a DARPA project, and the Web developed out of a desire for scientists to have a better tool to exchange data about their respective research projects. So if Google’s desire to increase advertising revenue brings us a more open standard for mobile devices, perhaps that’s what is needed to put the basis for a real P2P net out there.

Whether all the pages that mention Britney Spears (Google does seem to be given to slightly exaggerating the actual number of pages in its search results) are relevant or not, for the purposes of making a backup of data, we really don’t know. I could imagine that once a real P2P net is established, the actual use of the net will give a clue to what’s sufficiently relevant to be backed up, similar to the demand driven proliferation of copies (seeds) of files on bit torrent today.

Now quite apart from sparring over the doability or not of an independent P2P architecture for our communications, which I enjoy, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the article you posted here. After re-reading it, I see that I may have missed some of the deeper significance of what you are communicating. To sum up my current understanding of this:

We have the basic communication infrastructure, which consists of the links between all computers forming the internet. The links are provided by backbones and access providers. Perhaps that infrastructure could be improved by adding a layer of mobile connectivity through opening mobile devices up to direct connection between each other, rather than routing all traffic exclusively through the providers.

On top of this infrastructure sits a layer of communications protocols. Today we have a dominant server-client architecture which we inherited from the world wide web that was established in the 1980s.

What keeps us from overcoming that legacy arcitecture, which has many drawbacks you have listed, is that the overwhelming majority of transactions today is firmly grounded in the client/server paradigm. Revenues are made by exploiting our attention and even things which have a P2P flavor such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are really ways to keep us linked into the client-server meme.

It would be desirable to overcome out attachment to the client-server architecture in favor of a P2P net or ‘Peernet’ as I have recently called it. The difference between today’s Web and a hypothetical future Peernet is as great as that between the traditional media (both print and TV) and the World Wide Web.

What is needed, it seems, is a strategy towards the transformation of the web-dominated Internet of today into the ‘Peernet’ of tomorrow.

Reality-Check Time. Google is an Advertising Company. Google makes almost 99% of its revenue from Advertising, and that is derived from monetizing our ‘attention-data’ and locking up a 2-sided-market almost to perfection with Adsense for web-publishers, on one side and Adwords for web-advertisers on the other. (reflect on where the consumer is in this equation? i.e. disempowered, and simply being bombarded with ads) If Google is pushing ‘Android’ (which I think is a most unfortunate name, that conjures images of scenarios from films like iRobot, Blade Runner, or Spielberg’s 2001 epic A.I.) ~ If Google is behind ‘Android’ then they will only have one motive, and that is to extend their advertising dominance into yet another sector.

By the way, although the web (apparently) does have 66.3 million Britney Spears pages, and you and I might consider the subject “garbage”, or not useful. To exclude this content from an ‘alternate web’ would be to take an elitist position. One of the great things about the web is that it doesn’t make these distinctions. It doesn’t make judgements about which piece of content is more important than another, and so to postulate a new system that would develop a “a way to distinguish the garbage from the useful stuff” may in fact be a retrograde step.

Lastly, my preoccupation with the limits we face today does not mean I do not pay attention to, or am involved in “how communications technology is evolving” It is simply that actual ‘manifest’ innovation requires quantifiable and do-able plans that can be backed up by sound project-development methodologies. Because to get anything actually done, one needs buy-in from partners, financiers, and ultimately consumers.

yes, the idea is actually evolving and it’s really in two or even more parts.

It started out with an idea to back up the data on a P2P cloud. You are right of course that we could not and probably would not want all of those articles on Britney Spears. We’d have to make a choice depending on storage capacity and relative importance of the data we’d like to store. Who would make the choice? Don’t know. Once we decide to do something like that, a way to distinguish the garbage from the useful stuff would likely emerge.

The next part of this was the need – or I should rather say – the desirability of having a P2P based network, just in case. I don’t agree with you here that in case of a catastrophic occurrence we wouldn’t be looking for a way to network but rather for food and water. Certainly the first scramble would be for personal survival, but I could imagine that if we had a way of networking, even the basics could be easier to handle than if everyone had to act on their own. Co-ordinating help and rescue after a disaster could for sure profit from a working P2P mesh of connectivity. And if the disaster was bad (whether man made or natural) a network could help putting things back together again. If then we also had a backup of at least some of the more important data, we’d be off and running in little time.

Perhaps you look too much at the limits we face today, instead of how communications technology is evolving. In this context, the artile about the developing Android standard provides some encouragement. (Sorry the link in my last comment to that article didn’t work – here is the correct one.)

With regard to storage, we’re fast developing media that can hold ever increasing amounts of data. With that future storage capacity, the task of making a useful distributed backup might become much less daunting than it seems today.

Although making an ‘alternate internet’ is a lot more feasible challenge than backing up the web, my sense is that as long as we have electricity and a basic ordered civil society, we will have the internet. ~ There may be countries who choose to block their citizens access etc, but these would be the minority.

There is some merit in forms of independent-connectivity, and we have looked at this issue, but for practical purposes we always came back to building it on top of TCP/IP. Mesh networks are interesting. If some potential is going to open up there it will reveal itself soon enough. It’s not an area that I am particularly up to speed with in terms of the latest technical advances.

I think you are planning a job for P2P that P2P doesn’t deserve, and certainly this idea would not be suited to “wireless mesh networks connected by radio bridges” and relying on “handsets” forming “multi-hop networks”. That kind of technical hook-up would more likely enable us to perhaps bypass the telco networks and just talk to each other for free, but not to do any kind of mass storage backup.

Sorry to be so dismissive, but I think its way way beyond the scope of any kind of grass-roots movement to somehow create some kind of mirror of the web in case of “natural catastropic occurrences” a) its way too big a problem, and regrettably b) if there were such a “catastrophic occurrence” it would probably not be “natural” and those of us that might be left alive would probably be worrying less about all the data, and more about finding water and food than …a wireless mesh network.

both on the statement that these ideas are – at least for now – quite “out there” and that probably a first step will be to increase consumer awareness of the inequities and flaws of the currently dominant client-server paradigm.

When I say that P2P needs to develop its own infrastructure, I am really saying that the physical infrastructure the internet is currently running on is not impervious to disruption, perhaps from a desire to control but much more importantly from natural catastropic occurrences we have no way of predicting with accuracy at this moment. It would seem prudent to develop an infrastructure that is constructed from the bottom up, starting with wireless mesh networks connected by radio bridges for the longer distance connections. Something that is widely distributed and can be upheld simply by the actions of users of the net. It would simply be good practice to have a workable “Plan B” for the internet, just in case…

I agree that this is not urgent urgent, and that it would be good to start building the local mesh networks, simply thinking and experimenting how to link them together across countries and continents, as an exercise of caring for the future. If we never need to fall back on this, so much the better. But at least we should have things in place for the eventuality. There is an important positive development at this moment with the Google-supported Android mobile handset standard evolving, which could tap the resource of a huge number of mobile phones to jump start a ubiquitous mesh of peers as the basis for the mesh. Probably this would be more effective than WiFi, both because of increased reach and because of the ubiquitous presence of the hardware already up and running. Handsets could form multi-hop networks among themselves as an aside to their principal use, linking in to the providers’ phone network.

You say we should

“shine a big light on the inequities of the currently dominant client-server paradigm, and build increased consumer awareness of its flaws so that large groups of consumers, (and the people who influence them) are more inclined to break away from Web-Lock-in, and experiment with these new upcoming systems.”

Couldn’t agree more. But rather than just pointing out the inequities of the current paradigm, we need to provide an idea of what could replace it. Here, Martien van Steenbergen in the Netherlands has done some interesting work in laying out the basics of intelligent P2P interaction between nodes on the mesh, in his narrative of The Wizard, the Rabbit, and the Treasurer, which is part of a larger project he calls Armillaria.

We need something like that to bring the ‘Peernet’ alive and make it attractive for people to experiment with and adopt it. There is a lot to be done for programmers here who feel a calling to help advance the move towards a society natively based on the principles of P2P.

For instance, I don’t really agree with your comment that: “P2P needs to develop its own infrastructure quite independent of the hardware and even the connectivity that powers today’s internet.” This is a somewhat extreme position that implies the need for ‘revolution’ and not simply ‘evolution’.

The existing core Internet backbone, (powered incidentally by 340 separate Internet backbone providers globally) while subject to degrees of segmented private ownership is still largely open, flexible, and is a medium that does not overly discriminate against innovation, even in the P2P field. One just has to reflect on Skype’s fairly successful disruptive activity in the telco arena (246M unique downloads, and 27M regular users) to see clear evidence of the power of a P2P system to take on the status quo and kick butt.

New systems will emerge. I think the worthwhile activity is to shine a big light on the inequities of the currently dominant client-server paradigm, and build increased consumer awareness of its flaws so that large groups of consumers, (and the people who influence them) are more inclined to break away from Web-Lock-in, and experiment with these new upcoming systems.