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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."
Powerful technologies can be used for powerful things. Blizzard hired the bittorrent developer to help it distribute patches for World of Warcraft. P2P isn't illegal, using it for stealing is... P2P doesn't steal files, users do.
Cap bandwidth or GB of transfer per day. Don't tell me what I have the "right" to use this data capacity for. I know Zhang is only suggesting that it's possible, not necessarily a good idea, but don't give the ISPs any stupid ideas.
-b.
how are ISP's going to take to users maxing out their upload bandwidth 24/7 running commercial p2p clients? Somebody's got to pay for the infrastructure. I can't imagine the current networks aren't optimized for web browsing and light uploading in short bursts (i.e. pictures, word docs and the occasional wmv).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"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."
We have lived in such a rare time. We had access to a communication tool like no other in history. And for a brief moment, it was free - totally free. Unencumbered by the dictates of rich and powerful, it was without parallel in history. Anybody who connected to this great web of systems had just as much chance to make his message heard as anyone else. My email of undying love to my wife-to-be received the same access and dispatch as the advertising messages of multi-national corporations. Anybody with a good idea could put it out there for the world to see and if it had merit, it would gain in popularity. Google sprang from this freedom. So did Slashdot. And goatse. And it was the unusual confluence of public money and free enterprise, along with some very smart and generous folks, putting energy into something new and unprecedented that made this happen. Take one bit out of the equation - say the taxpayer-financed Department of Defense, or a Linus Torvald, or a Netscape or the many other pioneers who contributed to this vast project - and it doesn't happen, or it happens in a way that prevents the kid in the basement in Des Moines the opportunity to play.
But people who have acquired wealth and power don't like it when any old slob can do what they do. I mean, what good is being rich and powerful if it doesn't let you move to the head of the line? Now, a race is on to crush the experiment in liberty that has been the Internet. I guess it was too radical, too much of a danger to tyranny and concentrated wealth, to last very long.
We should all feel privileged for having seen the rise of this rarest of creatures - the fully open agora of information and ideas - and we should all feel sad that it couldn't be defended from the greedy and power hungry.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This has been said many times in the past few years, but it's still not feasible. One big reason YouTube is popular is because it is "Instant-On." No waiting for it to download. Generally no waiting for "buffering."
BitTorrent and the like are incompatible with that feature. BitTorrent does not download videos (or any other file) in order, and it's actually somewhat harmful to the torrent to distribute the same chunks to everybody. BitTorrent works so well because it gives everybody on the torrent unique chunks to pass along. Not good for streaming.
Secondly, ISPs drastically limit upload. This means that to get even close to realtime streaming downloads, the seeders (the content provider in this case) need to have massive bandwidth available. Otherwise, it will take to long for the torrent to really get going with other seeders, and the first ~50 people will have to wait to watch. So you're back to having powerful centralized servers again.
Plus, what benefit do I have for letting them use my upload? With most broadband connections, saturating the upload makes browsing at the same time slow with high latency. It might make sense for community sharing, where the content provider can't afford the bandwidth, and therefore I would want to contribute, but it doesn't make sense for companies to demand that of me.
The Internet is inherently a P2P network. Client/server architectures, though popular now, are a recent overlay on the TCP/IP architecture. Multicast, the Internet version of the broadcast popular in analog comms for decades, is still enough at odds with Internet architecture that it's barely used.
The Internet is a network of peer networks of peer hosts. P2P[2P[2P..]] is how everything works already. It's refreshing to see the decentralized, inherently "democratic" and primarily egalitarian Internet model starting to force centralized "old guard" media organizations to admit defeat. If they get on the bandwagon, they can be Ps in the P2P network. If not, they can keep their old network, and we'll barely notice they're gone.
--
make install -not war
MULTICAST.
Why is this technology being, by-and-large, ignored??
As the Internet evolves, more and more of everyday data storage for a variety of needs from storing family albums
to medical histories to corporate databases will be done in (highly encrypted and massively distributed)
data clouds, including P2P-hosted data clouds.
And more and more computing will be done in on-the-fly compute farms in grids, and some of this computing will no
doubt be hosted on legions of small P2P edge-of-net computing resources.
With such a scenario, how is it a good thing to allow ISPs to peer inside this cloud of encrypted and fragmented
and dynamically coalescing data to somehow exercise traffic cop (or border patrol) authority over it.
That sounds to me like the worst possible idea.
This idea is effectively the same as saying the ISPs should be staring over my shoulder as I surf or work over the net and
vetoing which websites or webapps I look at or use. No way. The net must be neutral to what it's carrying, or it just
won't work. And the P2P-based net of the future must have the same properties of neutrality to traffic that the
current general internet does (or should have.)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?