Mojo Nation Responds (to Clay Shirky)
"Is the digital pasture we share endless or not? If it is — when bandwidth, disk space, and processing cycles are really "too cheap to meter" or, in other words, "not worth worrying about" (how many people said electricity was too cheap to meter?) — then resource contention is not an issue. However, if there is a boundary around this pasture, or if there are local bottlenecks, then the users must have a mechanism for allocating the resources."
I don’t agree either that freeloaders are not a nuisance to P2P systems. Some careless people "pollute" Napster with broken or mis-named files that they don’t care to erase or rename on their hard drive. Clearly those that don’t care about how they contribute to the community can lower the overall quality of service. When time is the ultimate scarcity, these things matter.
