The Commercial Future of Torrrents 314
acrid_k writes "Yahoo is covering a story from SiliconValley.com entitled BitTorrent moving uptown. From adding Ask Jeeves content in search results to investigating use of torrents for sharing bandwidth for paid downloads, the future is looking both more restrictive and more commercial. You have to wonder about a crucial part of the equation: why would internet users share their bandwidth to benefit media companies?" From the article: "BitTorrent already has struck deals with video game publishers to distribute games with its technology. Cohen's bid to commercialize BitTorrent is a measure of how far the entertainment industry has come since the late 1990s, when
Napster introduced millions of people to the power of peer-to-peer technology for downloading songs -- and mobilized scores of lawyers to shut it down."
I support it totally! (Score:3, Insightful)
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http://www.dreamsyssoft.com [dreamsyssoft.com]
come on editors! (Score:3, Insightful)
BT would be good for flat rate services (Score:2, Insightful)
Could this be the beginning of the end... (Score:2, Insightful)
Thats one of the more overlooked commercial applications I can think of. Not only quite legal, but useful as well.
It's not all bad (Score:3, Insightful)
If the big players depend on the technology, it means we'll have an easier time defeating some of the current restrictions planned to curb P2P... such as limiting DSL upstream to a bare minimum, or charging for higher-than-average upstream.
Lots of providers all over the world are still considering this as we speak. Using commercial torrents would put enormous pressure against such measures.
it's a network (Score:4, Insightful)
a) The network is not yours to do with as you please. It is OUR network and you are participants. Participants != owners, no matter how would much you would like it to.
b) You don't get to choose your neighbors on the network.
c) It is a priveledge, not a right, for you to participate on the network.
d) You don't get to control what goes OVER the network. Yes, there may be things you don't like but deal with it.
Thank you for your time.
Re:BT would be good for flat rate services (Score:3, Insightful)
But that idle last-mile bandwidth is essentially free, and bandwidth from central servers or CDNs is not free. Thus BitTorrent is cheaper, even if it is in some sense less efficient.
Re:Could this be the beginning of the end... (Score:2, Insightful)
It wouldn't really work unless the webpage/site is already friggin huge. Mostly because to be of any use you first have to download the torrent. Over HTTP. And then unpack it, get a list of the peers, start trying to connect to them, hash out who has what and who's going to give you what and who you're going to give what. And then the transfer starts. And maybe one of the peers dies, so you have to go grab that chunk from someone else. After going through the last few steps a couple times, you're done!
But really, all those small bits of latency add up very quickly. The only way you could reduce it would be to in parallel try to grab the same chunk multiple times from multiple peers. In essence, you'd likely vastly multiply the amount of bandwidth, memmory and CPU usage this will take. (Take that all you "we have enough (cpu|bandwidth|memory|hdspace) so stop giving us more" people!)
Realistically, BT is really only usable for file transfers of any significant size.
What IS feasible is a distributed caching system like Akamai's. I don't even pretend to have a clue how their stuff works, but I'd imagine something like that would be much much better than any BT-derived solution.
That's just my $0.02
Re:I support it totally! (Score:3, Insightful)