Routing is handled by servers at Opera, and the computer on your desk is addressed as "unite://computername.username.operaunite.com". Where possible connections are peer-to-peer, in just the way that the internet was originally envisioned, but much routing will be through the Unite proxy. Conspiracy fans have long posited that the proliferation of NATs and Firewalls is part of a process to divide the internet into "publishers" and "consumers", and Opera is happy to play up their part in reversing this process…I remember when the Mozilla browsers first added in-browser FTP and HTTP engines, which seemed like a neat idea, but as these were add-ons or extensions, their reach was even less than that of the
Opera web browser.
This is a neat idea, which I would hope would be picked-up by other entities. The return to a
universal publisher model of the web would be a
good thing for everyone as it not only provides the masses with greater power, but it would
liberate the minds of the
non-technically gifted.
In an odd trend, when the web was younger, it seemed more common for most users to have a
web page of some level, just to have their say--even among the non techies. Grandma would have a cookie recipe posted, while mom and dad would highlight what's going on with their kids. These days, doing this is considered a
cyber-space oddity; the exception rather than the norm. People have moved from a democratic model to the
walled garden social networks which has limited their expressive power, but provided a comfortable cookie-cutter communication experience. The current mentality has shifted to the believe that the common people
need an environment managed by a large corporation to tell them how to express themselves.
If the idea behind
Opera Unite catches on, the victory will not be that users have yet another way of making data available, but that it will cause a mental shift back towards what
Tim Berners-Lee originally envisioned, a
web where users had control of their own information and
the masses were
the soul of the web.