Simson Garfinkel has written a great piece for Technology Review, describing the ways in which P2P technology could give us a more secure, stable, efficient Internet:
* One of the weakest points of the Internet right now is the domain name system, which is run by a loose confederation of name servers. Running DNS on top of a peer-to-peer system instead could dramatically improve its reliability.
* Today, if your business runs a small Web server and the site suddenly gets very popular, the server can crash from all of the extra traffic. But if all of the computers on the Internet were part of a global peer-to-peer Web cache, then small companies and individuals could publish their material to the multitudes. A good system would even prevent malicious modification of the Web page contents when they were served off other machines.
* In the event of a terrorist attack on the Internet's infrastructure, a peer-to-peer system would be far more likely to recover than a system that depended on top-down control.