In "Pushing Peer-to-Peer," Garfinkel describes pros and cons of "P2P" architectures, without bogging down in the music file sharing debate, saying, in part:
"Peer-to-peer is pretty powerful stuff. What we’ve seen so far—the copyright infringement systems—is really just the beginning. Peer-to-peer could overcome many of the fundamental problems that are facing the Internet today—problems of centralized control, vulnerable servers, and the difficulty that most organizations have scaling. On the other hand, peer-to-peer could also make the Internet’s security problems worse, by allowing hackers to create large-scale attack networks. "
See: Pushing Peer-to-Peer (October, 2003)
Simson Garfinkel is the author of 12 books on information technology and its impact.