BitTorrent Creator Tells ISPs to Work with Swappers
Largely ignoring copyright infringement, BitTorrent (BT) creator Bram Cohen told ISPs how to manage heavy file-swapping traffic and said his P2P application can help push on-demand downloads over live streaming. Cohen, whose creation is said to facilitate at least 35% of Internet traffic, also addressed content industries’ plight at the Next Generation Networks (NGN) conference Tues.
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ISPs can’t realistically “rate-limit” P2P traffic on the network without suffering at competitors’ hands, Cohen said. Markets with provider monopolies, such as parts of Canada, have been able to limit or block such traffic, but in the U.S., generally “everyone just goes to the competition” if they see an ISP is limiting their file- sharing capacity. ISPs have a good business opportunity - - find the users consuming high amounts of bandwidth and focus on getting them to upgrade to faster, costlier connections. They should make bandwidth more “symmetric” -- raising upstream speed so it more closely parallels downstream speed -- to keep customers happy and improve traffic flow, Cohen said. His tests of BT’s effect on network traffic suggest transfer speed is lower within the same ISP than between users on different providers. Such bottlenecks can be eased if ISPs keep cached copies of files crossing their network, which in principle should improve user performance and reduce ISPs’ bandwidth costs, he said.
The big question isn’t if content industries will use BT or other swarm technology to distribute music, movies and TV, Cohen said: “The leap is doing online distribution” in any comprehensive way. Business models for online distribution are hampered by stress on digital rights management (DRM) and watermarking technologies, he said. A $10 charge to download a movie might make the business model feasible, he added.
BT isn’t likely to be used much for live-event streaming due to its architecture, Cohen said. To keep users from downloading the same pieces of a file at the same time, which ups chances of missing pieces, BT uploaders send and receive random pieces of the shared file. Adapting this limitation to live streaming, where everyone needs the same piece at the same time, would be difficult, Cohen said. The market isn’t moving to live coverage anyway, but rather on-demand downloading, he said, adding he doesn’t know anyone with a TiVo DVR who uses it to watch and pause live TV. Responding to audience questions, he agreed sporting events and news coverage of disasters might be applications of BT or swarming technology for live streaming.
Cohen’s aim with BT wasn’t to spur copyright infringement, but he expected that, he said. The system’s design -- IP addresses in full view of all downloaders and uploaders -- ensures no one in the network remains anonymous for long. BT is irrelevant to debates over extending the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), Cohen said in answering a question, thanks to its transparency. HTTP also can to be used for copyright infringement, he said: BT isn’t “fundamentally different.” Cohen has long encouraged BT users not to trade copyrighted works through the network, even while saying he doesn’t like using “good” or “bad” to describe uses of the network.
If he could design BT again, Cohen wouldn’t “go through so many cycles of experimentation” with the protocol, but wouldn’t change much other than “some pretty technical things,” he said: “I'm quite happy with it.”