Governing BitTorrent

Seems like I first became aware of BitTorrent 2-3 years ago. At the time, the thing I thought was really interesting was that it had metadata hooks that offered some real potential for discovering & organizing emergent communities of interest. Since then, it's moved to the center of the file sharing war between file sharers and copyright holders.

Until this week, Comcast had been blocking torrents since they were consuming large chunks of a finite resource. This week, they stopped blocking them....however, the price is that all users are subject to bandwidth restrictions. All this makes sense since it seems like bandwidth demand is likely to always exceed supply.

BitTorrent is a fascinating piece of technology that highlights the difficulty of decentralized governance. Although there is no single BitTorrent governance baseline/standard (and its governance capabilities continue to evolve), my impression is that BitTorrent governance is relatively complicated given that (a) it's a very narrow problem (sharing large files in a bandwidth constrained environment), and (b) it only focuses on a small number of factors (e.g., how fast you can download, how much you share).

It makes me wonder if the complexity of decentralized governance increases at least exponentially when compared to centralized governance....regardless, it seems that centralized just won't scale, so we're forced to explore the decentralized landscape...not something we're comfortable with or know much about since (a) centralized approaches been effective until this point in time/complexity, and (b) we hate anything that's not easy to command/control.

I've followed various discussions about emergence (CAS, chaos, etc.) since stumbling across Gleick's "Chaos" shortly after it was published in 1987. I even slogged through Kauffman's "Origins of Order" in the late 90's. One theme that continually emerges is a search for "information for free". I'll stay out of the controversy about how successful this search has been...and simply note that, as far as I know, there's no mature theoretical foundation upon which emergent control capabilities can be built.

Bottom line: when it comes to order/information, I've not seen any emergent governance capability (that "works") that is anything other than narrowly focused on a small set of specific cause-effect relationships. Which makes me suspect that we'll ultimately wind up with IT/business governance that's more centralized than most folks anticipate today. That does NOT mean it will look like what we think of as "centralized." For example, DNA is a centralized governance mechanism in the sense that the same data is in every cell (except red blood cells). It's radically DEcentralized in how the information is translated into action. And, the more we discover, the more complex it gets...e.g., there are other information molecules (RNA, etc.). If BitTorrent & DNA are any indication, designing governance that's truly agile/adaptable is in the distant future....and it's likely to be a long, strange journey.