Techies have often responded to the copyright woes of music and movie people by urging them to get a new business model (more or often less politely). My question for the day: why doe the burden of reinventing itself does lie only on "old" business methods? The P2P business model (legality of downloads aside) is nifty, but surely could use refinement. This need for redesign offers the best hope of success for "paid" content services like the revamped Napster.

Raw P2P services are, well, seedy. The success rate of searches is uneven, the quality of downloads more so, and the failure rate of download attempts is high. There are issues with viruses, security problems (as unwitting users accidentally share excel spreadsheets), one is liable to stumble across nasty porn, and so on. What are the implications of this?

To start, it means a business history of P2P might well end up looking like the history of chat rooms. A bit of raw data: The first chat room, PLANET, was born of ARPNET in 1973. In 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen developed Internet Relay Chat. In the mid 1990's newbies flocked into general-purpose, un-moderated chat rooms springing up everywhere. In the late 1990's, AOL served about 15 million users, and found that the average user spent about 19% of his time in chat rooms. Today, chat's growth has slowed and the average user spends much less time in chat. And more experienced users prefer targeted and focused instant messaging or just plain email. Moderated forums open for limited times and limited purposes offer a nicer environment. The unmoderated forum is mostly for the brave, foolish, or twisted. Concerns about children's safety lead MSN to close its free chat rooms in 2003. Chat rooms have gotten a lot of attention from law enforcement, too, with IRC providers like CIT/Foonet shut down for intentionally hosting hackers.

Getting back to P2P, in earlier blogs (e.g. 9/14) I've posed the challenge of how content providers can remake the market in the (relative) absence of enforceable boundaries. How will paid compete with "free"? The history of chat shows that a too-chaotic, dingy sort of medium may driver users to more controlled environments. Thus legal music downloading services are having success in getting consumers to pay up. So content providers may take heart. But this mini-history of chat shows that techies should take heart as well. Neato tech can survive and reinvent itself despite (needed) attention from law enforcement focussed on real bad guys and a dose of accountability.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 9:33 AM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines...

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