P2P - From Internet Scourge to Savior

microbrewer writes "The MIT Technology Review has up a feature discussing the future of p2p networks. Specifically, they look at their role in content distribution, in the age of ubiquitous video services. Soon, the article asserts, the very same p2p-style networks that 'threatened' legitimate business may be the basis for most video-on-demand services." From the article: "So how could additional P2P traffic actually be a good thing for the Internet? Carnegie Mellon's Zhang points out that because peer-to-peer networks exploit both the downlink and uplink capacities of users' Internet connections, they distribute content more efficiently than centralized 'unicast' technologies. Zhang also says it should be possible to label P2P traffic so that service providers can track it and decide how much of it to allow through their networks. He and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley have founded a startup, Rinera, to develop software that will give service providers such control."

Comments

Re:Yeah but

[Capt James McCarthy]

It depends upon your ISP. Speakeasy's agreement states that I can use all of my bandwidth 24/7 without any problems. A SysAdmin's ISP.

Practicality and reality

[br00tus]

As far as broadcasts over the Internet done in a technically sensible way, old-timers may remember the MBONE initiative. This would have distributed broadcast video via IP Multicast. All of the "Tier One" ISPs I knew of, as well as many Tier Two ISPs had the capability to do this, the equipment in place - all they had to do was turn IP multicasting on on their Cisco routers. But management did not want to do this, because they thought it would fill their bandwidth up with video, which they didn't want. At the time, traffic shaping and billing technology was not really up to speed, people were still used to how NSFnet did things to some extent. So instead of multicasting, people did p2p, which is less efficient. After Napster began coming under legal assault, Gnutella was released with technology to specifically evade attempts to block it.

Aside from technical issues, I think decentralization, peer-to-peer and so forth is the way to go. I don't want to be the little receiver of content from the Giant Corporation with DRM, monopoly price increases and whatnot. To me it makes sense (like Mbone did) and gives me more freedom. It allows me to publish content, which Youtube and whatnot can not censor if they wish. Which is precisely why it won't happen - we don't live in some federated decentralized anarchist council structure, we live in an imperialist, capitalist society where capital is centralized in a few hands, along with the media, political power for the most part, and so on. Which is why peer to peer decentralization has been under attack since day one.