I love the feedback on my position on P2P traffic. The well thought out "You Suck", " Or "the internet isnt that way", or "The ISP is selling me 10mbs, I can use it anyway I want"
Guess what, business models do evolve over time. You may want your ISP to be exactly how you want it to be. You may read into your experience with them anything you want. But it can and will change if the economics don't work for them. No amount of whining about "what the internet is supposed to be" will change any of that.
You can argue about how fiber should make it all the way to your bathroom if you want, that won't create the capital for ISPs or force them to spend it the way you want them to.
Maybe instead we should look at some realities and options.
So I've come up with a better way to get rid of P2P without calling for an outright disabling of the protocol. Maybe ISPs should just treat upstream bandwidth the way cellphone companies treat minutes. Give users an option on how many upstream bits they want to be able to use and during what times of day.
Charge more during prime usage times, less during off hours. For most internet users, like probably 99pct of us, it wouldn't make a bit of difference in our bills or consumption. In fact, many of us could opt for cheaper plans because beyond the family photos or videos we may upload every now and then, or the rare backup of our hard drives, most people don't consume much outbound bandwidth at all.
Of course that probably wouldn't be the case for users and abusers of the P2P protocol and applications. Imagine what would happen when WOW users or the rare bit torrent WAREZ or illegal music or video downloader got their bills and realized that they could either throttle their upstream bandwidth and wait forever for their goodies (if they could get them at all ), or open the throttle and watch free downloads start to cost a lot of money. Think that would be fun ?
How are they going to feel when they get a bill for upstream bandwidth for periods when they werent even downloading anything, but their PCs were busy acting as seeds for other P2P clients ? Think they will enjoy paying that bill ?
So I take it all back. DONT block P2P traffic. Just charge for upstream bandwidth usage like cellphone companies charge for minutes. That way if P2P really is more efficient, it will be a non issue. More people will use P2P and will never have to worry about their upstream bandwidth charges.
Or, if its less efficient, it will survive for applications where the owner of the application is willing to pay for the bandwidth the application consumes at both the host and destinations. It could also survive if off peak pricing for upstream bandwidth is cheap enough that its worth it to the user to pay for the bandwidth and take delivery of files during that low priced time period. A truly market solution. Imagine that.
Let the "you suck" comments begin.
P2P Part 3
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(Page 3)42. Mark -- I'm glad you agree with my solution in the last post that ISP's *could* if they wanted to charge for uploads (probably best to say you get 10m upstream per month, and get charged after that). There is of course concern about how much people actually upload. Wouldn't that kill youtube, flickr, picasa etc?
But my #1 question is -- why is the market not taking care of this itself? I know you to be a proponent of market forces -- whats wrong with this?
And the answer is that left to itself, the ISPS could care less what you are transmitting, they just want your money. If they thought they could make more money offering a "less than unlimited" plan, they'd do it. Why do you want to force business to regulate themselves in a way they don't want to.
I think the bandwidth shortage arguement is a red herring. If there is a need for more bandwidth, the ISPS can easily add more. I'm sure you're familiar with Verizon's FIOS. Wi-Max is another easy way to roll out more bandwidth to those who need it. My point is, the market is very capable of dealing with supply/demand issues, and as far as I can tell, it's doing an excellent job already.
Finally, I'd like to ask you if maybe YOU'RE the one who should be changing YOUR plan. If you wanted to, for not much money (relatively) you could have a VERY fat pipe running into your house, and not have to share with anyone. In fact, Comcast offers services like this. Perhaps you need to accept that p2p will stay exactly where it is, and people who wish to be unencumbered by it need to get a different service.
I recall hearing that there is a coalition of Amazon, MSFT, Yahoo, Google and a few others who have publicly stated that if Net Neutrality ever came to pass, they would lay down their own connectivity. Using Wi-Max, and modern fiber, their new network would be vastly superior to the old one. Does Comcast, Verizon, ATT etc want to even risk that happening?
People who are saying "you suck" are such idiots, and I'm pleased you get the same giggle out of them that I do.
The one thing I would ask of you is a fair disclosure of what HDNet is, and how much bandwidth affects your businesses. I know you have said that this is your position, and it has nothing to do with HDNet. Be that as it may, I truly believe the p2p impacts you directly -- but more from an ability to infringe on copyright than anything else.
I'm not sure you'll profit on it by being first, but heck what do I know? I have yet to buy MY favorite sports team (and even if I had the money, I'm pretty sure Jerry Jones is not selling).
43. Ted,
I think you'll find that if you actually measure the bandwidth used by P2P in your scenario vs. intelligent content caching the P2P method will fail miserably at protecting the ISP. (assuming that it's a non-network topology aware p2p protocol like bittorrent)
Mark, you suck...
I honestly wish there was a market to prove you wrong, but unfortunately there is not much of one, so if you get your way, we'll all have to suffer your well regarded opinion. There are plenty of good uses for outbound network traffic, in fact, many of them are precisely the type of behavior that is contrary to the sit on your ass and watch whatever crap the commercial world sends you culture that you seem to want everyone to subscribe to.
Posted at 2:27AM on Nov 24th 2007 by Bryn
44. You are so off the mark it isn't even funny. You have tossed together the likes of a pirate torrent downloader with a business user of Skype or Groove. On top of this you totally have no idea of how most of the residential Internet works it appears.
1. Most residential ISP's limit upstream and the limits are a fraction of downstream. In my case I have roughly 5MB down (yeah right) and 350kb up. The local Cable provider has plans up to 10MB Down I am told and 512kb Up so it's clear they have plenty of wiggle room and bandwidth. The provider is already limiting your access to the Internet by limiting your up speed. Your neighbors acting as a seed for a torrent file are not putting any hit on your downstream, you sound like a spokesperson for the RIAA when you say that.
2. Business use of P2P Tech is growing and it actually reduces Internet traffic, not increases it. Applications like Groove, Foldershare, Skype and others allow businesses to share information with their employees and customers without placing everything on a single point for downloading. By distributing the file to multiple Peers the load on any single provider, router, backbone is reduced, not increased. On the other hand as you suggest using Google I think it was for uploading your video for them to download to thousands of end users would in fact increase the load on that pipe, that provider, that backbone, etc. How happy would you be if you just happened to be on the same loop as Google and you were sharing it with all those downloaders?
P2P is not the problem, if anythign it's a solution. I can remember back when ISP's screamed about how much email some users were downloading and putting caps at 10MB/month, how much email do you get/send? Would you like to limit that email because it's in the pipe and clogging it up too.
Posted at 3:17AM on Nov 24th 2007 by JamesB
45. Dude seriously, where do you get this stuff? :-s
I really am starting to believe you haven't the slightest idea how the internet works...
You say: charge for upload right? Well, for every download one person engages, there is another machine/person who is uploading that information.
Hell, just visiting this site, makes me download these posts, and makes your server uploading them to me.
Seriously man, wake up, this isn't a problem of limited bandwith, frankly I have never even encountered any sort of lag whatsoever, and I live in Belgium (aka internethellhole).
Next to that, I bet someone whose wallet packs such a whallop as yours could easily afford a hookup to the fiber-optic lines directly, so why don't you ;) I know I would ^^
That's what needs to be done, like it's already been done in Japan for example: their internet is as fast as a normal ethernet network, which is somewhere in the regions of 10Mb upload and 100Mb download.
Hell, even here in Belgium, I know there is already fiber-optics in the ground, but for some godawful unknown reason, it's not hooked up yet.
The point is, the internet evolves, and so do the tastes and needs of the common people. It's not because you only send pictures of your dog to your relatives, that the rest of us don't engage in audio/video conversations, don't watch internetTV, play games online and what have you. Hell, today I have to make a statistics assignment, for which I have to log into a remote server on my school, to use a remote install of SAS. Guess what kind of upload that's going to generate ;)
Frankly, if you really do suffer from any sort of lag, I suggest you re-evaluate your internetsetup.
Posted at 4:45AM on Nov 24th 2007 by Soliber
46. Well, upload is capped in a sense, but charging for it seems more reasonable than banning it.
My only worry is that I know that measured values are gamed constantly in favour of the provider - at least here, and yes, I know for sure, I work in that area.
Charging more sounds sensible - you upload too much, you skip to the next range and pay, say 5 or 10USD more. Compared to my 64USD /month charge it is not that big a raise.
On the other hand, if technically P2P IS helping the ISP as several people pointed it out, maybe you should penalize non-P2P downloads and uploads.
How about that?
Posted at 5:44AM on Nov 24th 2007 by Roland Hesz
47. "Guess what, business models do evolve over time."
and business models adapt to consumer demand.
You seem to have lost grasp of the fact that the demand is for the internet...what on earth does the cellphone model have to do with it?
(how's aol doing by the way? didnt they have a real good p2p unfriendly minute by minute system goin back in the day? Odd how the promise of unlimited internet access blew them the hell away)
An ISP like comcast is more than free to treat the internet like a cellphone... go ahead... I DARE YOU.
and we can watch as the throngs of comcast customers run like to the nearest real INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER.
Yeah, they will stay alive as long as they can continue to gauge the poor remaining comcast customers who have no alternative isp available to them until bit by bit other INTERNET service providers arrive to save them.
After all, p2p users are the tiniest fraction of consumers...pissin them off wont hurt.
riiight.
If YOU personally are having a problem with your isp...and the isp points a finger at p2p users. All that means is your ISP is selling you WHAT THEY CANNOT PROVIDE.
And THAT is the message you seem to be sending. A Good internet user...does not make use of what they pay for and in turn an ISP can take money for what they really cant provide.
But really, youve got to get a clue...bandwidth demands will Only INCREASE drastically over the coming years, and the vision of INTERNET service providers you seem to have (ie: p2p free Comcast) will indeed go the way of the dinosaur,and it wont be p2p users who send them that way...it will be another ISP with a Better Business Model that does it.
yeah, poor guys will still be crying about p2p...but theyll sure be sitting on top of what used to be comcast's money while they do it.
"cars will never replace the horse"
"The TV will never catch on"
"nobody needs more than 1 phone"
"Its a series of Tubes"
"block p2p"
Posted at 5:58AM on Nov 24th 2007 by Alan Martin
48. Where in the world did the complaint about WoW come from? There is no way that WoW uses comparable bandwidth to even moderate internet surfing... Also, you dont stack a queue of downloads and leave it running 24 hours a day. Even the most hardcore players rarely play more than 30 hours a week.
Posted at 8:25AM on Nov 24th 2007 by Robert Ober
49. Could anyone here give me an explanation about why people think P2P sharing is illegal, immoral, but acceptable? Thanks for your opinion in advance!
Posted at 10:04AM on Nov 24th 2007 by Miki
50. It is true that redefining the pricing structure would lead to a different market equilibrium and perhaps P2P would suffer. But this is not to say that it would become more efficient. You are only looking at a different definition of efficiency. Right now the system is good because it provides information to users quickly. You are saying the system would become more efficient because the system would be doing less work to deliver the same data, but nobody cares about this if it comes at the expense of the users' time.
Posted at 10:17AM on Nov 24th 2007 by bruce
51. Congrats, you just made an even more retarded case for yourself. Hey keep digging and you might make it to china. I think online gaming is a perfectly legitimate use of my connection that uses upstream data, so why should I pay more to play a bit of BF2 or whatever when we have cunt-tards like you surfing around on Facebook spreading your emo views. Get a grip, get out your house and get some fucking common sense. You really do sum up how retarded man kind can be in this day and age.
P.S. I highly recommend this: http://www.elc.co.uk/toy-43136 for your computer needs, should be able to cope with it.
52. Mark,
You are absolutely correct - this is an interesting thread to follow;-)
If I'm reading you right, the reason you don't like P2P is that it wastes / inefficiently uses bandwidth (at the last mile), and this "pay for uploaded data" is really the better way to go.
It's a fine argument, but haven't we been there already?
I certainly remember dialup charges based on how many hours you connected. People that used the network were paying for it. (And for some, it was better to setup their own dialup network than to pay to use a commercial one)
And then someone realized that if they had a million subscribers, and could get a measure of the right amount of infrastructure to supply service to the people that wanted to be on at any one time, they didn't have to charge by the hour, they could - tada - charge a flat rate to all of them!-)
Many business go with this model - charge a reasonable flat rate for service and know that some users will make more use of it than others. All-you-can-eat buffets, amusement parks, telephone service, and even cell phone service (flat rate cell is certainly starting in my area). The services differ, but the flat rate concept does stretch across them. (and for ISPs, the service is transporting data to and from a consumer's location)
I suggest to you that if the current system is so flawed as to collapse under the weight of "excessive use", that the free market will deliver a solution, people will adopt something new, and life will go on.
That is, when people go to the buffet, they understand that there may be service issues. It's not the same thing as other dining options, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have its place. If things don't stay well supplied, tasty, and pleasant, they'll choose not to return. (and that's just the way it goes)
Sure, some consumers may not be able to afford the newest, fastest, biggest pipes out there, but that really isn't a new situation is it? (or unique to connecting to the internet...)
And if some ISP can't keep up with the demands to supply their customers with the right mix of technology combined with business savvy, they close the doors, sell the assets and customers, and the world keeps revolving.
I am perhaps a bit too light hearted about this, but what's to fix that won't fix itself?
steve
Posted at 11:06AM on Nov 24th 2007 by Steve Tylock
53. Hello everyone,
Could anyone here give me an explanation about why people think "P2P sharing is illegal, immoral, but acceptable"?
Posted at 11:09AM on Nov 24th 2007 by Miki
54. Mark,
I've refined your model a bit. Largely I'm in agreement with you. P2P users are for the most part freeloaders, and no matter the legitimate uses of the technology for the most part we all know they are used to download content illegally. I'm not going to argue the morality of pirating content, but I certainly agree that the effect it's having on everyone's Internet service is unsatisfactory. The way in which the ISPs are going about attempting to combat it is failing (see Comcast's recent PR debacle), and they're not making anyone happy with their current solutions.
The need for a market based solution is clear. Offer customers something that will make them happy. I'm arguing on my blog for the creation of tiered service offerings from the providers. One is a metered service which in exchange for limiting your monthly transfer rates (and when I say limited, I mean limited to the extent that a normal user would never come close to hitting the caps, but a P2P user who uses 100x or 1000x more bandwidth than the average user wouldn't choose that plan) you receive a higher quality of service, and the second is the existing plan that will continue to work fine for the abusers. The abusers will just take a backseat in a network congestion scenario.
The whole idea played out in my blog post: http://clintsharp.com/down-with-p2p-part-2/. Hope you have a chance to read it and respond.
Clint
Posted at 11:57AM on Nov 24th 2007 by Clint Sharp
55. Makes sense to me.
Posted at 12:09PM on Nov 24th 2007 by Cyndi
56. i have no idea what you're talking about in this blog, i just wanted to say that you're awesome, and i almost did a speech about you in my speech class, but i decided dirk was a little bit easier to fit into a 4 minute time frame...
keep on keepin' on!
Posted at 1:15PM on Nov 24th 2007 by Lindsey
57. Easy for a billionaire to call into question the downloading of overpriced media (dvd, music, etc.). It gets annoying buying albums that have 1 good song, or going to the movie theaters to watch the same plotline unfold as the film before it. But hey, it's just as easy to condemn those who don't have the means to see every single film and/or buy every single album. For we are the ones who get burnt by the crap record companies and Hollywood bring to the forefront
Posted at 1:18PM on Nov 24th 2007 by John Kyle
58. It's sad the USA continues to focus on restrictions, regulations and acceptance of the oligopoloy ISP's and their crap low-bandwidth pipes labeled "high speed."
Japan and Korea, for example, have true high-speed internet connections often 10x as fast as here in the US yet 50% less per month as far as cost.
Posted at 1:30PM on Nov 24th 2007 by Steve
59. Mark, your thoughts on economics and business plans for "internetish" companies seem to have changed dramatically since I started reading your blog. I guess this has happened due to completion of you mentally transitioning from IP/Tech businessman to content owner/provider type.
However, the economics works against you: internet connectivity serves as a catalyst for change, economic growth and further development, just like railroads had been in last two centuries.
Much has been written about US falling behind other developed nations in this regard.
And you are calling ISPs to act more like cell phone companies? This is insane - you are asking them to adopt business practices that led cell phone industry to be 2nd at the bottom of customer satisfaction. Look at it: this is the most pathetic industry with "high-tech" prefix.
Because of businesses like yours, my TV experience is *still* retarded, handicapped by a stupid cable box from the 90s. We still do not have proper video over IP, we still have not moved away from retarded phone lines to VOP, we still intentionally "hooked" to technologically inferior cell phones and our computers have not made it to the living room. Because of such attitudes, my cell phone is dumber than average European sibling form 3 years ago.
Just go away - all of you: cable, catellite and cell phone companies and record labels. We do not need you. You are not selling us products we want, you are taxing us with "services" we can live without. You are slowing down economic and technological growth. (not you, personally, but companies whose business plans you like so much)
--
Eugueny
P.S. This is 2007. I pay $110/month for my cell phone service. And the damn thing cannot tell me where I am and getting football scores takes forever.
60. P2P is the poor man's higher speed broadband. When analog dialup disappears, and the average Joe get tired of the Telcos "dynamically-adjusting" their DSL data rate, then P2P will flourish. When the "every man" gets tired of automatic-updates sucking up all their bandwidth, then P2P will florish.
Remember, P2P is not about reliability or efficiency. It's about BUFFERING... near-realtime playback. HELLO!!! Big money hates it. The every man loves it. It will be the future's standard media for Internet Radio. But better yet, when P2P proves that it can be a platform for ad distribution, then big money will covet it.
Posted at 6:31PM on Nov 24th 2007 by www.freeway2000.com
41. Mark,
It's not a "market" solution when you try to get all ISPs to agree on a model. That's called collusion.
If you think this is a good idea, please start up an ISP with a per-bit model. I predict your competition would love the advertising fodder you would provide for them.
Posted at 1:47AM on Nov 24th 2007 by Matthew