But the distinction between "common" and "public" is not one that most people in most circumstances wish to preserve. Indeed, one of the functions of democratically-grounded government is to seek to functionally eliminate that distinction for its citizenry as much as possible in terms of their day-to-day lives.
We explore two possible explanations: private provision of public goods and generalized reciprocity. We investigate a particular form of private incentives to share content: redistributing traffic in the network to the advantage of the sharing peer.