John Gruber of Daring Fireball has weighed in on the iTunes Internet Sharing issue, offering a sound rebuttal to the several digital pundits levying criticism against Apple for disabling the feature in iTunes 4.01.
“I think it was more of a social experiment. Rendezvous networking is built on top of IP networking, so once the programming work was done to support sharing locally, it was likely very little extra work to allow it to work between any two IP addresses. The potential for abuse was obvious, but so was the potential utility. And so I think Apple tried giving everyone the benefit of the doubt with iTunes 4.0’s sharing capabilities. “