"please tell me what aspect of the"

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
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.


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