Re: BT Heavily Throttling BBC, All Video

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

 editor's note

For the record, I do not consider it part of my editorial duties to  
adjudicate opinions among the members of this West. I am sure there  
are many members of the list who  are willing to do this for me

Dave


Begin forwarded message:

From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com>
Date: June 12, 2009 3:56:55 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:   BT Heavily Throttling BBC, All Video

Talk about spinning, Dave. I am surprised you don't call Brett out on  
this boner.  He continues to state flat-out falsehoods as "fact" and  
you just forward them without comment.  When are you going to point  
out that all Brett does is troll and spin?

Brett Glass wrote:
> The simple fact is that P2P takes the carrier's bandwidth, for the  
> content provider's benefit, without permission or compensation.
There is no "fact" here.  There is no such thing as generic "P2P" -  
there are specific peer-to-peer algorithms and applications.    
Assuming Brett means a specific system called BitTorrent, which I will  
use for example, the actual factual basis of this claim are 100%  
false.  They are not even close to true:

1. Both the content provider and the users *pay* for the transport of  
*all* bits sent in P2P.   And they pay good money.  If 100 people are  
receiving a large file from a content provider, there are 101 payments  
going to ISPs, all of which are paying for transport, and substantial  
sums of money at that.

2. The end users of a system pay for Internet connectivity from their  
ISP, content providers pay for Internet connectivity from their ISP,  
and ISPs pay each other to peer.  Lots of payments change hands, and  
the ability of everyone to set prices is perfectly flexible, since no  
antitrust rules have been applied to this market.

3.  Conventionally, Internet access means that any host on the  
Internet can send packets to any other host on the Internet.  Packets  
are delivered on a "best efforts" basis, which means that they either  
get there or they don't, with the latter case occurring only when  
there are too many packets demanding to be delivered through a  
particular rate-constrained path.

BitTorrent cannot use any more capacity between two end users than  
their ISP provides.  The ISP can limit capacity based on its contract  
with each user.

Thus, there is no lack of "permission" (since permission to send  
packets is *inherent* in providing Internet access, by definition),  
and there is no lack of payment.

As a BitTorrent distribution of some content grows to support N users,  
each user's contribution stays constant.  They cannot exceed their  
ISP's willingness to grant capacity.

So where are the "facts" Brett cites, Dave?




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