FastTrack

~ the eulogy ~

The people who wrote FastTrack wrote Skype next. Same programmers, same city, four years apart. Everybody can name the second one, and almost nobody can name the first, even though for three years it was the largest file-sharing network on earth.

It came out of BlueMoon Interactive in Tallinn, under Jaan Tallinn, and was sold on to Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who shipped it in March 2001 through their Dutch company Consumer Empowerment under the name Kazaa. Napster was still in court over its index at the time. FastTrack's answer to that court case was to have no index anywhere in particular. Any machine with a decent line and a decent processor got promoted to a supernode without being asked, and from then on it held a slice of the file list for the peers around it while passing searches sideways to other supernodes.

By 2003 the network was carrying around 2.4 million people at once, which is more than Napster ever managed. Kazaa was the client most of the world installed, though Grokster and iMesh spoke the same protocol underneath, and Morpheus did too until the day it stopped.

The end of this I can actually place myself in is Skype. It arrived in Turkey as free calls to people abroad, and the network under it in the early years was the same supernode shape written by the same people in Tallinn. The architecture got a second life inside a product that never once had to explain itself to a user, while the first version is remembered, when it is remembered at all, under the name of a client.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Napster's weakness was a building. There was a company, a server, a subpoena that could reach both. FastTrack removed the middle by promoting ordinary users into it. Your PC did not know it had been elected, and if you turned it off the role moved to somebody else's machine in a few seconds. The protocol was encrypted and undocumented on purpose, which kept competitors out for two years until the client-to-supernode half was reverse engineered in 2003 and the giFT-FastTrack plugin appeared.

The clients were another matter. Kazaa shipped with adware bundled deep enough that a cleaned build called Kazaa Lite appeared in April 2002 and became, for a lot of people, the actual product. The protocol was free and open by accident. Everything sitting on top of it was a business with an office.

~ the funny part ~

In February 2002 Morpheus stopped working. Not gradually. StreamCast had been licensing FastTrack and had fallen behind on payments, so the Kazaa side used the auto-update channel to change the protocol out from under them, and several million Morpheus users opened their client one morning to find they could not connect to anything.

It was the cleanest demonstration anybody gave of what these networks actually were. The whole legal argument for peer-to-peer was that no one controlled it and no one could switch it off. Then somebody switched off a third of it over an unpaid invoice. Morpheus went to Gnutella and stayed there.

~ how it actually ended ~

Grokster went first. The Supreme Court ruled against it in June 2005 and the company shut down that November. Kazaa lost in the Australian Federal Court in September 2005, and on 27 July 2006 Sharman Networks settled with the four major labels for $100 million and converted Kazaa into a licensed download store. There was no announcement about the network, because a network is not a thing that issues announcements. The supernodes just kept quietly falling below the count where anything useful comes back from a search.

The date in the frontmatter is the day it lost its last big population rather than the day it ended, the same reading this site gives Gnutella. Kazaa Lite installs kept talking to each other for a while afterward, and the giFT plugin kept building. The Kazaa brand itself lasted until August 2012 as a subscription music service nobody used, which is a stranger fate than dying.

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