[ NNSquad ] P2P resource taking (was Re: pcap files of the Comcast forgeries?)

[Wes Felter <wesley@felter.org>]

On Dec 18, 2007, at 11:25 AM, Brett Glass wrote:

> Intellectual property issues aside, this is one of the biggest  
> problems
> with P2P software: it is designed to take resources from third parties
> to accomplish the goals of the authors of the software. This is not
> something that anyone concerned with privacy or security should  
> support.

This is only tangentially related to supernodes; it's more of a  
response to the "P2P = bandwidth theft" argument.

In the phone network we have "caller pays" (regular calls) and  
"callee pays" (toll-free, collect). I see P2P as a form of "receiver  
pays" for Internet data transfer. I suspect that allowing both models  
will increase efficiency by allowing data transfers to take place  
that would be uneconomical under a "sender pays" model.

There is some evil out there (like Skype offloading all their NAT/ 
firewall traversal cost to US universities and then monetizing the  
resulting network effect lock-in), but all P2P shouldn't be painted  
with the same brush.

Wes Felter - wesley@felter.org - http://felter.org/wesley/