Just as in animal populations, P2P networks require a sizable "critical mass" of users, and overharvesting can cause a systemic collapse - what if this were done on purpose?

http://students.washington.edu/achen...finalpaper.pdf

Well it is happening.

In the paper it gives the example "For example, if the entire Internet was shutdown, but a large group that was “clumped” together away from other users continued, they might still be able to trade files. Thus, students in dorms may never be stopped from trading music with each other,"

That is being done on the network with some vendors clumping their programs altogether on the network to limit the effects of faked messages.

This is another good post worthy part of the paper.

"Thus, although the effort needed to cause a catastrophe has been solved in this paper, it is also not clear whether or not reaching this point is ever feasible. It may be that potential
punishment is not serious enough, or cannot happen widely enough, to deter new users. Or perhaps the carrying capacity of a well-designed P2P network is huge, and amount of flooding
can overwhelm the network."

Which gnutella has been at all time high user counts since morpheous "joined" the network. Since searches doesnt get to a large part of the network most searches dont reach the hosts that are spamming bad queries. There is also hashing on the network so just misnaming files isnt going to have much affect anymore.

For the most part many veteran P2P users are used to misnamed, bad files because its always been happening even though not always on purpose.

By using lawsuits and other ways to instill fear in the P2P communities will discourage people from using P2P programs or from sharing. This has been known since Napster why people still freak out and demand the "feeling of saftey" even though they could not actually be "safe."

There was also some discussion about faked and bad queries along with other topics not too long ago on the GDF if you want to check that out.

Gnutella is ahead of any "hacking" because of the open source nature of the network and hackers are the ones programming the clients.
You can assume people have already tried to shut down the network, just as a test or just for fun, and it hasn't worked, except for that lame bogus version of bearshare vinnie put out about 8 months ago that almost shut down everything.
As soon as developers listen to requests by the users and add anon features, then the threats of lawsuits won't work.

And as long as all developers work together instead
of having their own civil war.

... Unless you group in clusters. Which is partially done already. The article is a bit outdated IMO.