Social revolution on the internet

Lenin is standing on a computer server holding the icons of Amazon, Yahoo, Facebook and Google in his hand. But not for long. A crowd, holding up signs reading, ‘Long live Bittorrent’ and ‘We want peer to peer’, are about to pull him from his socket.

The cover of Dr Rahman’s thesis depicts his vision for a society in which people all share information with one another in a decentralized manner, using peer-to-peer networks.



“The killer application of peer to peer networks is the illegal downloading of films and music over the internet,” says Rahman, who defended his thesis last week at the EEMCS faculty. “But so much more is possible. Maybe we can make distributed search systems, so we no longer need search engines, like Google, that decide what search results we find.”



But for this to happen, better p2p protocols need to be developed. The goal of Rahman’s research was to compare different constructions and come up with more robust and social ways of sharing information than the current systems.



“Current systems are mostly based on simplistic economic models, like the rational action model, in which all actors seek to maximize their own profits. These p2p systems are designed such that users with small bandwidth – who thus have little capacity for uploading to others – receive little help from other p2p users in return.”



“The idea behind this is the same as the idea that people will leave the country if you tax them too much,” Rahman continues. “This is much too simplistic. And as a matter of fact many famous economists go against it. People do act selfishly, but also altruistically.”



During his research, Rahman found a new socio-economic structure for p2p that yielded higher average download speeds than all others. In this structure – or protocol as it is called – users are loyal to one another regardless of the download and upload speeds of the other users. ”I did simulations in which I let 3,270 different protocols compete with one another. Everybody was surprised to see that this loyalty protocol was the most robust one,” Rahman says, laughing. “It’s just like the Indian economist and Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen said: People are not rational fools.”  

In een ingezonden brief in de Volkskrant citeert Plasterk het nieuwe regeerakkoord: “Het kabinet beëindigt het diversiteit/voorkeursbeleid op basis van geslacht en etnische herkomst.” Verwijzend naar de eenzijdige samenstelling van het nieuwe kabinet – weinig vrouwen, geen allochtonen – voorspelt hij dat het door OCW bekostigde Aspasia-programma van de universiteiten en NWO zal sneuvelen. Dit programma geeft universiteiten een bonus die vrouwen tot hoogleraar bevorderen.

Maar zal het nieuwe kabinet ook de subsidie voor de Echo Awards voor topstudenten staken? Als staatssecretaris van hoger onderwijs was Rutte enthousiast beschermheer van de Echo Awards. Plasterk kan zich bijna niet voorstellen dat de nieuwe premier de steun aan dergelijke programma’s intrekt: “Wat is er in hem gevaren?”