On 3 February, Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, Chair of the CNIL presented Francesca Musiani with the “Data Processing and Liberties” Thesis Prize, the 5th of these prizes that was awarded by the CNIL[1]. The prize rewards the quality of her research work on “peer-to-peer” architectures.

The PhD Francesca completed in October 2012 led to the publication of a book at the Presse des mines in 2013, Nains sans géants. Architecture décentralisée et services Internet, (Dwarfs without Giants. Decentralized Architecture and Internet Services) prefaced by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Francesca, your research is entitled « Dwarfs without giants », how can these « dwarfs » be characterized?

Looking for information, participating in social networks, watching videos or storing files are online activities many of us a carry out daily. Therefore, we often use the online services provided by the “giants” of information technology, the best known being Google, Facebook, YouTube or Dropbox. The network architecture of these giants is based on a model which creates a dichotomy between a server providing resources and customers seeking resources. The P2P network computer model I have studied is very different. The devices in P2P answer the same needs of use – searching, networking, storage – but the special feature of this model is that the involvement of the participants is essential for the smooth running of the service offered by the network. Not only do the participants put part of their equipment and computing resources (calculating capacity, storage space, bandwidth) at the disposal of the network, but the resources are also directly available to all their peers. Or, to put it in another way, the dichotomy typical of the client-server model between a server who is a resource provider and clients seeking resources is replaced by a situation where the peers as a whole host or provide the resource and at the same time seek it.

I have taken an interest in the development and appropriation processes of Internet-based services which include this very particular choice of design: delegating responsibility and control of data management and flow to the “margins” of these networked systems. P2P is designed on the model of a decentralized structure, precisely so that the communications and the exchanges occur between equally responsible nodes. In this type of architecture, the operations necessary for the smooth running of the systems technically depend on those I call the “dwarfs” of the network: the users, their terminals and their computing resources, mobilized together in order to serve a common objective.

How did you approach this exploration?

I followed what Janet Abbate[2] calls the “ballet between programmers, software and users” that builds decentralization in the Internet services. My objective was to explore the sociopolitical implications of the distributed and decentralized approach to the technical architecture of the Internet services. Studying the “lower strata” of these systems makes it possible to investigate the purposes they are used for, the dynamics developing within, the steps taken, and the rights of their users.

My approach has been to follow the developers of three Internet services built on a decentralized network model: a search engine, a storage service and a video streaming application. I also followed collectives of pioneer users that develop within these services, and punctually, the political arenas where the organization and governance of the Internet are discussed.

My approach to the exploration of these decentralized network architectures also consisted in addressing three main research questions. The first one relates to the new ways of sharing expertise between service providers, network operators and the users these applications may generate. The Internet services built on the model of the P2P architecture create novel configuration: becoming a user also means making resources available to the collective or to the service. Through the analysis of the new forms of commitment, not only of the users but also of the other actors concerned by the implementation of these services, I sought to understand the modalities of their technical and economic viability. My purpose was also to understand how the “classical” issues, especially those associated with the management of digital contents, data safety or privacy, are regulated.

The second question is about the network-wide collective dynamics likely to be implemented with the development of the P2P. These services propose the developing of new local-global relations: some of them take the form of a service of distributed storage based on the fragmentation of files and their scattering across the users’ network; some others, of a service conceptualizing a search engine “by affinities” in which the users are defined by their capacity to establish a link with the knowledge they hold, in sight of their own localization within the network. These applications raise novel questions about the links between the individual and the collective: how is global recreated from the splintering of local? What visibility into the collective do these systems offer to a user who becomes an active node, and not simply a participant connected to a global network? What are the new digital disparities likely to be established in these situations?

A third question tackles the emergent forms of regulation of these technologies. What I mean by property rights are notably the rights to privacy and confidentiality of personal data, or the rights of access to database contents. The P2P “first generation” networks have challenged the classical intellectual property protection rules. They have contributed to the redefinition of the notions of author and contributor, to the reconfiguration of the users’ rights – in particular the rights to privacy – and to the shift of the boundaries between private and public uses.

Which conclusions can be drawn from your research?

To answer this question I would like to highlight key issues associated with the development of P2P. The first one relates to the construction and the production of P2P as an alternative to the Internet services. This alternative is implemented in the interaction between quite diversified uses, but also between the constraints and the technical opportunities of the distributed model. The components of the network, and the dynamics involved in operating it, have generated a decentralization- and a partial recentralization movement. From this double movement are emerging quite original technical devices and economic models that make this alternative attractive.

The second key issue is that the P2P architecture is at the root of the shaping and of the stabilization of special forms of users’ collectives and of social ties. Developers seek to introduce a “social paradigm” into the P2P in order to take advantage of some of the characteristics linked to the users’ preferences, profiles and relations. In turn, the approach of the P2P contributes to the circulation of data packages in the “lower layers” of the network directly from a computer to another. It contributes to shaping the users’ gestures of sharing or exchanging. New ways of acting together have indeed emerged.

The third key issue deals with the P2P applied to Internet services as an object and producer of rights. The Internet regulation and governance ecosystem surrounding P2P services (e.g. the legal definition of the P2P technology and of some of its uses) may affect the emergence of these services and shape their design and their architecture. At the same time, the objects, resources and data flows produced by P2P are contributing to the shaping of particular conceptions of data privacy, network security and control over personal data. They may therefore be considered and handled as systems for defining and protecting the rights of the Internet service users.

One of the conclusions of this research I would like to stress is that an approach informed by Science and Technology Studies – the one I adopted in this research – can help the researchers who explore the governance of the Internet to rid themselves of a conception of the “network of networks” as a recognizable space a priori, unaffected by the institutional strengths of the offline “reality” or, conversely, hidden behind the codified spaces of traditional politics. The STS allow emphasizing the mechanisms that bring the various participants to the technical, political and economic management of the Internet to build common knowledge, to recognize some of them and not others as “facts” of the Internet, and to draw limits which can reconcile the concerns of the experts with those of the users.

Francesca Musiani is currently conducting further research into the governance of the Internet by the practices, the infrastructures and the network architectures, still in the perspective which has up to now guided her works, greatly inspired by the STS and definitely interdisciplinary-oriented. Her current projects turn on the technical and political debates developed around an alternative and decentralized domain name system (DNS), as well as on the implementation of dynamics and devices of “distributed trust” within the Bitcoin system of decentralized e-money.

Francesca is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation. She collaborates with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and was a Yahoo ! Fellow in Residence at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, Washington, DC (United States).