Few impressions after just closed CodeCon 2002 (http://codecon.org)
Internet infrastructure owners are very good at defining how it will
be used. Free running engineers are finding cracks but there are very
few left and the existing one are being closed.
- NATing is successfully choking P2P. All solutions require
subpoenable and destroyable proxies. Address space is owned by whoever
owns the network. If you have no address you can't publish.
- It is to be expected that ISPs will further limit upload bandwidth.
Even 50:1 download/upload max bandwidth ratio will not affect "bona
fide commercial apps" and will fuck all P2P big time. This is trivial
to do. Upload will become more and more expensive and in some
juristictions subject to licensing ("WHY DO YOU NEED 20 TEDDY BEARS?")
- Engineers will code no matter what, especially if out of a paying
job. Most offered solutions are the old ones with variations that do
not promise much.
The only half-promising solution is wireless, due to a fundamental
problem with owning the ether and that terrible mistake that FCC did
with waiving license requirements for 802.11b. How this solves
long-haul connectivity remains to be seen.
Global village is no more, we are back to city-block sized villages.
