Peering Peer-To-Peer Providers

The early peer-to-peer applications eschewed commercial arrangements and instead established a grass-roots model in which the collection of end-users provided their own distributed computational infrastructure. While this cooperative end-user approach works well in many application settings, it does not provide a sufficiently stable platform for certain peer-to-peer applications (e.g., DHTs as a building block for network services). Assuming such a stable platform isn't freely provided by a benefactor (such as NSF), the authors must ask whether DHTs could be deployed in a competitive commercial environment.