problem. Our company Edgemesh
( https://edgemesh.com) is working
on peer-enhanced client-side content
acceleration, alongside other next-
generation content-delivery networks
such as Peer5 ( https://peer5.com) and
Streamroot ( https://streamroot.io),
both of which are focused on video de-
livery. Others, such as the open source
InterPlanetary File System (IPFS;
https://ipfs.io) project are looking at
completely new ways of defining and
distributing and defining “the Web.”
Indeed, the concept of a better Inter-
net has crept into popular media. In
season 4 of HBO’s sitcom Silicon Val-
ley, the protagonist Richard Hendricks
devises a new way to distribute content
across the Internet in a completely dis-
tributed manner using a P2P protocol.

“If we could do it, we could build a com-
pletely decentralized version of our cur-
rent Internet,” Hendricks says, “with no
firewalls, no tolls, no government regu-
lation, no spying. Information would
be totally free in every sense of the
word.” The story line revolves around
the idea that thousands of users would
allocate a small portion of their avail-
able storage on their mobile devices,
and that the Pied Piper software would
assemble the storage across these de-
vices in a distributed storage “cloud.”
Then, of course, phones explode and
hilarity ensues.

The core idea of a distributed Internet does make sense, but how would it be built? As I learned in my self-im-posed solitary confinement so long ago, before diving into possible solutions, you need to define the problems more clearly.

 

Problems of a Distributed Internet

In 2008, Tom Leighton, cofounder of
Akamai, the largest content-distribution
network in the world, outlined four ma-
jor architectures for content distribu-
tion: centralized hosting, “big datacen-
ter” content-delivery networks (CDNs),
highly distributed CDNs, and P2P net-
works. Of these, Leighton noted that:
He then noted what others have
found in the past, that although the
P2P design is theoretically the most
scalable, there are several practical is-
sues, specifically throughput, availabil-
ity, and capacity.

Throughput. The most commonly
noted issue is the limited uplink capac-
ity of edge devices, as noted by Leigh-
ton in his 2008 article:
P2P faces some serious limitations;
most notably because the total down-
load capacity of a P2P network is
throttled by its total uplink capacity. I M
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