p2pnet - rss feed: Is the end (of the Net) nigh?
p2pnet.net News:- Repent, ye sinners! For the end of the Net is nigh!
New online TV services such as Joost, from Kazaa billionaires Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, and YouTube, now owned by Google, could crash or seriously impair it, say reports from this month’s the Cable Europe Congress in Amsterdam.
And it’s all your fault, you p2p file sharing sinners, you.
“Most of the IP (Internet protocol or data) traffic is peer-to-peer (file swapping), and most of that is video,” Reuters has Spanish cable operator ONO’s Richard Alden saying, going on, “Every year we have to invest substantially just to maintain the user experience. In fact it has actually decreased. People (Internet service providers) don’t like to talk about (the fact) that just to stand still, they have to invest. But you cannot keep investing at the same clip.”
Research group Gartner estimates 60% of uploaded Net traffic is p2p, “mostly from consumers swapping films and TV shows,” says the story.
Seen from another perspective, Google’s TV chief Vincent Dureau, “has admitted the internet is crap for TV,” says Andrew Orlowski in The Register.
“The web infrastructure, and even Google’s [infrastructure]…doesn’t scale,” says Dureau. “It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect.”
Be that as it may, to get around the problem it contributes to, and massively, Google has generously, “offered to work together with cable operators to combine its technology for searching for video and TV footage and its tailored advertising with the cable networks’ high-quality delivery of shows,” says Reuters.
Would that mean, “putting a sidebar of Google AdWords on your TV set, next to popular movies and TV series?” - wonders Jack Schofield on Guardian Unlimited, and might this develop into another “tragedy of the commons“?
Is the Net facing a “Darwinian extinction” because it, “can’t generate enough business to ensure its own survival?” - asks Orlowski.
And might Hollywood exacerbate the situation if it succeeds in its desperate efforts to peddle its movies online at exorbitant prices through retailers such as Wal-Mart? - inquires p2pnet.
Not to worry, though. At the end of the day, nature abhors a vacuum and even while corporate sectors are crying gloom and doom, private innovators and inventors, the people who live and work beyond the profit barriers and who got the Net rolling in the first place, will come up with the answers.
Just like they always do.
A company in Canada is about to launch what it says is the first commercial quantum computer, and US data storage expert Mike Thomas has already postulated a system with virtually infinite capacity.
And you can be equally sure that once these, or even more far-out, systems are established and in place - and have been swallowed whole as part of the corporate greed cycle - it’ll start all over again.
Also See:
Reuters - Google and cable firms warn of risks from Web TV, February 7, 2007
The Register - Google - this internet won’t scale, February 9, 2006
Guardian Unlimited - Net can’t handle TV, warns Google, February 9, 2006
exorbitant prices - Wal-Mart movie download farce, February 7, 2007
quantum computer - Quantum computer launch, February 7, 2007
infinite capacity - Every file you ever owned on 1 disc, February 26, 2004
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February 11th, 2007 at 3:12 am
What the doomsday theorists seem to forget is that Web creator Tim Berners-Lee warned that services such as streaming media and Flash would severely congest the Web by the end of the century. This was solved in two ways. One was the expansion of broadband to consumers over the original dial-up method of consumer access. The other was the creation of then-revolutionary content delivery networks such as Akamai. There is no reason that P2P can’t become the Internet norm in a few years. However, the Internet will need to be severely decentralized. When I say “decentralized,” I mean with respect to the current client-server method, where the server provides a majority of the bandwidth to its users. The decentralized method would almost be a “net nutrality” of bandwidth distribution. There’s no question that the Internet and ISPs would have to severely be reorganized to support this idea that everyone connected would have the same distribution abilities, regardless if they are Google or someone accessing Google. This would mean that content providers would have much more limiting abilities than they do now because “bandwidth neutrality” would cause them to have less then they have now, but the new P2P-based Internet could make up for that by having the “server” upload the same bandwidth quantity that the “client” downloads back.
This is probably how the Internet operated back in the pre-commercialization era. I would imagine that almost every governmental or educational entity connected to the early Internet had just as much sending power as they did receiving power (i.e., there were no “hosts” or “clients”), and that this model was drastically shifted during commercialization in the 1990s because of the established linear method of goods distribution. If this is the case, there’s absolutely no reason, in theory, that total bandwidth can’t be re-proportioned back to the consumers. Yes, this might cause the amount of total bandwidth available to everyone to shrink as more and more people connect, but I can imagine a semi-centralized method of setting up “super-supernodes” being set up to combat this on all levels.
Of course, I am not a network traffic analysis expert nor do I have any true knowledge about how material is distributed through the Internet, and it is very possible that my ideology is flawed (perhaps greatly flawed).
February 11th, 2007 at 9:41 am
I agree too and I’m not an expert either.
Decentralization has always been the answer.It is what p2p is all about in the first place. However, it also means loss of control for those who are used to having it and they will fight it tooth and nail.