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Mark Cuban Calls on ISPs to Block P2P
boaz112358 writes "Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner, HDNet CEO, and noted gadfly is publishing on his blog that Comcast and other ISPs should block all P2P traffic, because as he says, "As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders." He complains that commercial content distributors instead of paying for their own bandwidth, are leeching off consumers who are paying for the bandwidth. As an alternative distribution method (at least for audio and video), he suggests Google video."
.. so this assholes logic is his traffic is better then mine? I pay just the same as he does for the service and as long as i use it inside the terms of my agreement he has no right to say anything.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The same argument can be applied to voip and more recently internet television. But it's a logic stance for an established player with enough capital: they have the means to provide enough bandwidth to things in a traditional client-server way.
P2P is only in its infancy. More and more applications are being found for it. Joost is one example, where p2p is used in a way to allow a relatively small player to operate. New uses even bring bandwidth use down, keeping it local.
It would be stupid to kill these opportunities for the benefit of a few big players.
the pun is mightier than the sword
Ok... so now paying customers who buy a service as it is advertised are freeloaders?
This is getting silly..... ISPs should NOT be advertising services they can not actually provide and then blaming groups of their own customers for their lack of infrastructure.
As a consumer, I want my P2P experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are regular downloading freeloaders, only getting content from one source, and clogging up the tubes, rather than downloading different parts of my final file from a whole bunch of different (and potentially local) sources. Seriously.
Moving to Google Video... yeah I guess that'd help a lot. Let's centralize everything and see how well that works out for everyone.
Or wait... why was it that this P2P concept was invented again? "Distribute load" or something... difficult concept.
Try again Mark.
Then, is it the customer's fault that his ISP is grossly overselling their capacity?
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
Perhaps the ISP shouldn't oversell their bandwidth? It would result in higher prices, but it would be more honest.
They should get their gig of porn, too. In fact, gigs of porn all around.
Or at least to whomever's ISPs promised them service. That's the real problem here, the overselling of backhaul capacity and quoting of mindless 'burst' speeds rather than average or continuous transfer. What everyone is doing with their connection is irrelevant. If I'm downloading porn or watching YouTube, the effect on my neighbors is going to be basically the same (witness most recent 'imminent death of the net' story, which IIRC blamed video).
We need a little more truth in advertising in internet access. Let's make them advertise two separate figures, one for speed and one for transfer, for starters. And if they're going to do QoS or prioritize traffic, that needs to be disclosed, too -- not just that they're going to do it, but on what basis they're going to do the QoS and a breakdown of what traffic is going to get what priority over what else.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
How do you prioritize among lots of anonymous encrypted bitstreams?
Mark Cuban is an idiot. You'd think that someone that made most of their money sending media over the Internet would at least understand how it works. TCP/IP itself is a "peer-to-peer" technology. Despite how many ISPs run their service, one of the overarching ideas of TCP/IP is that any machine can connect to any other machine, and if the other machine accepts the connection, can communicate. TCP/IP does not care which machine is the client or the server, and in some cases for some protocols, it is the server that connects to the client. So really, Mark Cuban is against the Internet as a whole, has shown that he is a crackpot, and can rightfully go back to obscurity where he belongs.
Hmmm, do you really want this? Think hard about this... It's a slippery slope...
What you are referring to is breaking of network neutrality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality).
******
The principle of net neutrality and regulations designed to support the neutrality of the Internet have been subject to fierce debate in various forums. Since the early 2000s, advocates of net neutrality rules have warned of the danger that broadband providers will use their power over the "last mile" to block applications they oppose, and also to discriminate between content providers (e.g. websites, services, protocols), particularly competitors.
******
So if universities do priorization, why not corporations, why not ISP's?
A slippery slope....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I use bandwidth for P2P and a lot of it. I also pay for the top tier plan that my ISP offers. If it's not enough to pay for the bandwidth I use they need to charge me more. This clown is out of his depth.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
I'll buy music when it's a reasonable price. No song is worth a dollar. It's just music. And a dollar for much lower quality music compared to the uncompressed CD format? What a rip off.
I'm all for supporting artists, but I won't support the RIAA and bullshit business tactics to do it. I stick to music from people I know or discover and that I can buy directly from them or an outlet similar to CDBaby.
"P2P allows a significant number of small-time content producers to get their content out to a lot of people. Otherwise, they could never afford it and only the big guys would get to play the game."
And this would make the big guys very happy. I wonder if our Mr. Cuban is a big guy or a small guy these days...
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Either that or get their own Internet access and get off the school's network.
They should not use the access they're paying for, but instead should go pay another internet provider also? That sounds fair. And by fair, I mean utterly stupid. It's not like you get to choose not to pay your inet fee - most schools either require it or bury it in other fees anyway, so even if you DO pay for your own inet access, you're just double or triple-paying. How about when you pay for internet access, you get to... I know this is crazy... access the internet? If it's too slow for Mark Cuban, he's welcome to run his own, faster network and put whatever policies he wants in to place to govern it. He has enough money. But he, you, and everyone else can stay the fuck out of my internet usage, thank you.
http://xkcd.com/386/
I think the term "business class" means something else when you're a student at a uni.
Anyway, this is a horrible idea. ISPs should just make sure they have enough bandwidth to satisfy everyone at peak time. Not doing so is called being cheap and nasty.
In Australia we have monthly download quotas, which some people hate but seems to actually be a good solution. If you want to P2P 200 gigs a month you can, but you're going to pay a lot more for your access than someone who wants to do 10 gigs a month over their company's VPN. Also, you have a well-defined limit to work to; I've seen quite a few posts here about some ISPs having a seemingly undefined "limit" after which they start asking you to curb your net usage. But if you ask them what they consider acceptable you'll never get an answer, because it's always changing. So, I might only get 40 gigs a month on my account, but I know I'll always be able to use it at full speed because my ISP ensures they have enough capacity to handle peak periods.
There is of course money to be made by catering to the heavy downloaders who don't care too much about performance, by selling them cheap accounts with heavily overcommitted bandwidth. But if you're doing that without being upfront about it, then you're cheap and nasty; and it shouldn't be the norm. If you pay for a X mbit/sec connection, that's what you should get, and the only time you shouldn't get the full throughput is if the host you're receiving data from can't handle it.
I think it's more that people don't care how ISPs make their money. It's not my problem if an ISP offers a product which they're unable to make a profit on, any more than it's my problem if a store mis-prices an item and sells it a loss.
ISPs have been telling everyone that bandwidth is cheap, by selling X mbit at Y$ per month. "Use it as much as you want and that's all you'll pay", they say. Now they're complaining that their customers actually think their $Y per month entitles them to X mbit of bandwidth. Gee, I wonder why that is?
If you sell an internet connection as an unlimited service, people are going to use it as an unlimited service. If you can't actually provide that, then don't sell it! IMHO, if an ISP that sells you an unlimited X mbit connection and then tells you you're using it too much, it should be an open-and-shut case of false advertising. They're entering into a contract with you without being able to fulfil their side of it.
In the internet backwaters of Australia, ISPs used to offer unlimited access plans on dialup. The low bandwidth of dialup meant that this was kind of feasible, because there's only so much you can download at 56k. When ADSL started coming out, they went to a quota system, because even a couple of hundred kilobits per second can add up to a crapload of data if left going 24/7, and data from overseas costs a lot.
So now I'm paying for 40 gigs of traffic on an ADSL2 link at ~ 19mbit down, 1mbit up. Sure, it's only 40 gigs, but they're my 40 gigs. I can do whatever I want with that and not worry about being throttled because my ISP doesn't approve of particular types of traffic.
There are ISPs here which offer cheaper prices for a much higher quota (and even some offering unlimited quotas at low speeds, i.e. 256kbit). I'm with a more expensive ISP because the cheaper ones heavily oversubscribe and that means you often get poor performance during peak periods. I don't have a problem with ISPs providing such a service; there's people who want to download a lot but don't really care if sometimes (or often) websites are slow to load. It's only a problem if they try to hide the fact that they do this.