Ok, so take a protocol like NNTP and make it include a provision for
expirations. I don't see anything wrong with a flood-fill scheme. We're
talking a lot less data than news. No control or distribution pattern
sounds like a GOOD idea if you want to be sure the system can't be co-opted
into a commercially controlled venture like CDDB.
However, provisioning for some kind of "this query brough to you by X
company" might be worth considering. Realistically, if someone wanted to
'give' bandwidth to a server they might want something in return. Allowing
the clients to choose to use such a server is worth providing. I'm not
opposed to this mechanism if I can setup and use a server that shares the
data input/output load and doesn't require the advertising spam. Heck, I'd
be willing to leave the "brought to you by" in the query records if they
came from a commercial upstream server. In practice, however, I'd omit such
servers from my server search path. That is, if such a server existed. But
at least I'd be ABLE to do this. The current CDDB doesn't allow for this.