Phil Agre writes:

"Technologies often come wrapped in stories about politics. In the case of peer-to-peer technologies on the Internet, the standard story goes like this:

Once the world was centralized under the control of a top-down hierarchy. Then came the Internet ... Peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies deliver on the Internet's promise ...

I propose to analyze this story ...

Architectures and institutions are often shaped to fit another another, but they are still different sorts of things. As a means of evaluating the prospects for P2P, therefore, I will briefly present four theories of the relation between architectures and institutions."

Peer-to-Peer and the Promise of Internet Equality