Information just wants to be Freenet

What advantage does Freenet have over Gnutella?

Freenet and Gnutella share only two things: They're both peer-to-peer, and they're both decentralized. That's where the similarities stop. Freenet is a very powerful peer-to-peer platform. The reason it's so powerful is that it takes data onto the network, it migrates the data toward demand and it mirrors that data so that it enables high-bandwidth data to move efficiently through the system. Here's the picture: With Gnutella, if someone wants something they go out into the middle of the street and they say, "Does anyone have Britney Spears," or "Does anyone have X document?" And if 1,000 people have it, 1,000 people are going to shout back and it's going to get really noisy. And when 1,000 people send it to you, they'll clog the network.

With Freenet, someone says, "Hey, does anybody have it?" and the information is sent to that person once. So, for instance, let's say there is a request for information "A" in London -- a music file or a piece of financial information -- and that info currently exists around nodes in Chicago. When enough people request it around London, the information will be sent once under the Atlantic. It will then mirror itself and spread itself among multiple nodes so that when you request in London it will be on a node that's closest to you. In other words, if there are 1,000 people in London that request that data, it's right there; whereas with the Internet or Gnutella, 1,000 requests translates to 1,000 messages that are sent under the Atlantic. That's what makes today's World Wide Web so inefficient. Freenet, you see, operates on the Internet, but outside the Web.

But when you make multiple copies, don't you run into another kind of redundancy? Instead of clogging the network aren't you just filling up hard drives? For example, how long does that piece of information from Chicago stay on the computer in Piccadilly Square?

It will stay there on the basis of demand. The specifics can vary, but popular data thrives on the network and unpopular data does not thrive. It's very Darwinian. It's a very intelligent and adaptive system; as Freenet learns the behavior of the flow of that information, it will respond accordingly. For Gnutella to achieve any of those things, as Ian would say, "They would literally have to start from scratch."

OK, if Freenet is indeed better than Gnutella, how do you plan to differentiate yourselves from other Uprizers, other Freenet-based businesses?

We have not only the creative architect and founder of Freenet, we also have a lot of the development team who are familiar with the environment. We can't stop anyone from building on top of Freenet. You can do it today. But I think we have a little more insight into what the possibilities are based on the nuance of the architecture.

Ultimately, where do you think all of this is going? You've made Freenet out to be the Internet's savior -- do you really think it can re-architect the Net?

Well, the original Internet is peer-to-peer, but when the Internet became commercialized it became centralized. The implications from a bandwidth standpoint are less than spectacular because it's not an efficient means of distribution. It doesn't handle high-bandwidth data efficiently.

But whether we could re-architect the Net is a bigger conversation. It's like the conversation about decentralized eBays, which sounds like a good idea but there probably needs to be some central place where the exchange is based, and that's eBay.

Really, the point is that the whole peer-to-peer story has been focused so far on Napster, Gnutella, Freenet and how artists and copyright-holders get ripped off. That's not the conversation that Uprizer is having. Uprizer is having a technology conversation. We believe peer-to-peer computing, distribution and infrastructure is the wave of the future. Everyone's focused on music, on movies; I think it's going to be 5 percent of the story relative to peer-to-peer. We really believe there is a serious paradigm shift occurring as we speak.

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