I think that file (not only mp3s) sharing is the ultimate goal of the internet. The current state when we have big servers to which clients connect is just a coincidence and is temporary. The future is fully distributed :)
Incidentally I win at teh internetz, broke this story on the 14th, if only I was famous I'd be, err, famous.
Besides it clearly says "web server" so... ;)
http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/08/my-tonguelashing-from-eben-...
Data centers get a lot of press, and it is warranted, but regular old desktops and laptops (and smartphones, etc!) are incredibly powerful and underutilized. The internet doesn't have to be cable tv, it can be the telephone game with checksums.
It's not clear what you're saying here, but I think I strongly disagree. Data centers have real economies of scale (both in dollars and in availability) which shouldn't be ignored. Web 2.0 "freeconomics" may be unsustainable, but you don't have to use that business model; you can make data centers (or "the cloud") work for you.
...and defeats the concept the internet, which is distributed data.
IMO the concept of the Internet is to move packets, and servers are equally legitimate as PCs.
But saying cloud computing is not the direction I believe it wrong. The idea of cloud computing is really adding more distribution to your network. So you can have cheaper servers all over rather than just your servers at one data center with a remote data store that never has been checked.
Opera Unite is really just the IRC and a slice of P2P. But there will be huge reliability problems as with any distributed P2P system.
There are other examples that have nothing to do with file sharing, like GPS, Google Maps, and pizza delivery.
Although I would disagree that pizza delivery is a piece of data ;)
And a file is just a way to store a database in order to interface with the OS, not the way records themselves are stored. Point is, the Internet is a lot more nuanced than "file sharing".