Free to Be P2P?

Thursday August 25th 2005, 12:15 pm Printer Friendly Version
Filed under:P2P
Posted By: Matt

More and more, I’ve been taking for granted that enlightened perception of P2P has been shifting from knee-jerk condemnation to a realization that it is nothing more than a network topology that can be used for evil or (increasingly) for good. It’s heartening that BitTorrent, the most recent king of the P2P mountain, is used quite extensively for legal purposes. There’s a lot of illegitimate content out there as well, of course, but the BitTorrent culture feels a lot less slimy than that of, say, Kazaa.

Well, so much for that. As Dave Weinberger reports, Apple is refusing to list widgets relating to P2P and BitTorrent on its widget page. I’d be curious to know whether this is really a blanket ban or whether they have a beef with BitTorrent specifically. The latter would certainly be regrettable, but not as bad as promoting the misguided view that everything P2P is tainted.

I hope that someone will send up a trial balloon in the form of a truly uncontroversial P2P widget in order to test their reaction. What about a Skype widget, for example. Would they choose to exclude that as well?


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