i2hub

» see i2hub.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I was at university for the whole of i2hub's short life, which sounds like an anchor and is not one. The login here was a connection to Internet2, and Internet2 was an American research backbone. Turkish universities sat on their own academic network and nothing about my campus put me one hop away from a machine in Michigan. This is a grave about a specific piece of infrastructure being briefly pointed at the wrong thing, and you had to be plugged into that infrastructure to be in the story at all.

Wayne Chang was an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He released i2hub on 14 March 2004, which is the date every retelling writes as 3.14.2004 because the joke was intended. It worked like the hub-and-client networks of the period, but it admitted only machines that could reach Internet2, which in practice meant it admitted only campuses. By the middle of 2005 it was reachable from more than 400 universities and colleges.

Internet2 existed so that physics departments could move datasets between each other. Its links ran at gigabit speeds in a year when a good home connection almost anywhere in the world was still measured in hundreds of kilobits. Put a file sharing client on top of that and transfer time stops being a consideration. The figure that ended up in every wire story was that an Internet2 connection could pull a DVD-quality copy of The Matrix in thirty seconds, and that figure is most of why the story became a story.

~ the dossier ~

~ the lawsuits ~

On 5 October 2004 the president of the RIAA named i2hub in testimony before Congress. For a piece of student software that had existed for seven months, that is a strange kind of arrival. On 12 April 2005 the trade body filed against 405 i2hub users at 18 institutions, and later rounds carried it past 600 defendants across 39 campuses.

None of it went after Chang and none of it went after the software. It went after named undergraduates, which was the design. A suit against 405 students is not really addressed to those 405 students. It is addressed to everybody on the same network who was not sued this time, and it worked on them the way it was meant to.

~ the last message ~

i2hub went offline on 14 November 2005, twenty months to the day after it launched. What Chang left on the domain was three sentences: "R.I.P. 11.14.2005. It was a good run. Forced to shut down by the industry." He closed it himself rather than lose it in a courtroom, which means there was never a ruling and nothing about the legal question was ever settled in public.

The founder did not vanish. i2hub.com today redirects to chang.com, and his later life includes a 2009 suit against the Winklevoss twins and their ConnectU partners over the proceeds of the Facebook settlement. That is an unusual second act for someone whose first one was a campus file share, and it is a reminder that i2hub was never really about music. It was about being nineteen and holding, for about twenty months, the fastest network anybody had.

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