>What does this emergent behavior mean in practice? It's not inherently good or bad. If my index becomes more popular than individual nodes, so what? Apathy or indifference is also a valid position. However, I was addressing the many who do think there's "bad" in that emergent behavior.
What does it mean in practice? Some believe Google's search index, Youtube's video service, Facebook, etc have too much power over the internet. Therefore, lecturing them that "the http protocol itself is already decentralized so what does it matter that one http node spelled "youtube" is more popular?" -- is not a satisfactory explanation. They want to change that power imbalance.
Therefore, I believe the social ideals for p2p video would be to take away power from Youtube and have it more widely dispersed. Ideally, nobody would be big enough to "dominate" in the web video ecosystem. There wouldn't be a Power Law of popular cache index servers with one eventually dominating.
I'm saying that p2p video really can't prevent that from happening if a bunch of users voluntarily gravitate towards index servers which are centralized -- which negates the power-dissipating intentions of p2p. Also consider that many video content creators would voluntarily upload their videos to those index cache servers which further solidifies the centralization of power. Humans keep being humans and will subvert the (global) goals of decentralization and (local individual actions) aggregated together inadvertently recreate centralized platforms!
If you don't care about that, that's valid but a lot of others do based on common complaints of Youtube wielding too much influence.
