Interesting People mailing list archives
"please tell me what aspect of the"
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 06:02:39 -0800
________________________________________ From: Tom Goltz [tgoltz () QuietSoftware com] Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2008 11:34 PM To: David Farber Cc: brett () lariat net Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Comments on LARIAT and Comcast not same problem At 03:11 PM 2/17/2008, Brett Glass wrote:
Alas, there is. Even if you throttle your BitTorrent client, your system (and your ISP) will be beaten on relentlessly with requests for the material. Day and night. Long after your own download is done. And unless you "relent" by not doing P2P, you are still taking your ISP's bandwidth for a third party. (See my comment to the FCC, mentioned earlier on this list.)
All Internet services are three-sided affairs. There's the customer of the ISP, the remote point that the customer of the ISP connects to, and then there's the service provider itself. ANY action I take that involves transmitting data can be taken as using the services of the ISP for the benefit of a third party. To argue that something is illegitimate simply because it "benefits a third party" is absurd. I run both mail and http servers on my Internet connection. There are several third parties to whom I provide these services to, not a single one of which pays my ISP for using my server. *I* pay my ISP for connectivity, and it's my position that it's none of my ISP's business who I choose to use that connectivity to serve. Why should P2P be any different? We could delve further into the terms of service that are offered to most retail ISP customers and look at the restrictions on running "servers" and debate if running a P2P application violates those terms. My personal opinion is that TOS restrictions on "servers" will fall by the wayside as it becomes better understood that the nature of the Internet makes this an unreasonable and unworkable restriction. Even today, such TOS are only lightly and selectively enforced. In the meantime, I doubt even LARIAT's customers are willing to accept a TOS that completely prohibits the use of BitTorrent or other P2P packages.
The entire point is that your software cares not whether any network is "overloaded," and seeks to bypass all of the safeguards against congestion which are part of the TCP/IP protocol suite. It is thus abusive to the network.
I wish to extend an invitation publicly that I have previously extended privately: Could you please tell me what aspect of the BitTorrent protocol makes it abusive? How does it "bypass all of the safeguards against congestion"? I have a reasonable background in network protocol design, and I have examined the BitTorrent protocol in some detail, and I fail to see how it can be described as "abusive." I won't say the same about the majority of the implementations that seek to monopolize all available network bandwidth for the program, although I will acknowledge that they can be acceptable network participant with a few simple and obvious configuration changes. ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- "please tell me what aspect of the" David Farber (Feb 18)