p2pnet - rss feed: P4P — the darker side of P2P?
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- “Ever since Bram Cohen invented BitTorrent, Web traffic has never been the same,” say Hannah Hickey and Suzanne Muzzin at the University of Washington. “Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, however, is a matter of debate.”
P2P is now the method of choice for sharing music and videos, they say, going on:
“While initially used to share pirated material, the system is now used by NBC, BBC and others to deliver legal video content and by Hollywood studios to distribute movies online. Experts estimate that peer-to-peer systems generate 50 to 80 percent of all Internet traffic. Most predict that number will keep going up.”
However, “Tensions remain” between users of “bandwidth-hungry peer-to-peer systems” and “struggling Internet service providers”.
Would these struggling companies include America’s largest ISP Comcast, recently given 30 days to comply with a Federal Communications Commission order to cease its traffic throttling actions aimed at P2P file sharers.
Or Bell Canada, Canada’s equally rapacious opposite number which is also in trouble for trying to impose so-called “traffic management” on its users, blaming P2P file sharers for the measures?
To, “ease this tension, researchers at the University of Washington and Yale University propose a neighborly approach to file swapping, sharing preferentially with nearby computers,” say Hickey and Suzanne Muzzin. “This would allow peer-to-peer traffic to continue growing without clogging up the Internet’s major arteries, and could provide a basis for the future of peer-to-peer systems.”
Could P4P, aka ‘Managed Peer-to-Peer for commercial delivery,’ be the answer?
With AT&T, Comcast and Hollywood anti-P2P enforcer the MPAA among the P4P Group working group members, and the DCIA (Distributed Computing Industry Association) involved, one has to wonder.
“The technology has the potential to lower bandwidth costs for ISPs and speed up downloads for P4P enabled filesharing clients,” says TorrentFreak’s Ernesto.
But, he warns, there’s a dark side. “The strong anti-piracy connections are fuel for conspiracy theorists, and Net Neutrality might be at stake,” he says, going on »»»
Earlier this week, researchers from Yale University and The University of Washington presented the latest findings from their P4P research. P4P is a new technology that could make any filesharing application (including BitTorrent) cheaper for ISPs, as it tries to connect to local peers as much as possible. Local traffic is cheaper for ISPs and reduces the load on the network. In addition, P4P enabled filesharing clients will download files faster than regular clients.
In theory this is a great idea. However, P4P requires collaboration between the developers of filesharing clients and ISPs, which might be a problem. Indeed, most P2P companies TorrentFreak talked to are not that excited about the initiative, but they wont say that out loud, and play along for the time being.
There might even be a darker side to the project, as the P4P working group includes some prominent members of the entertainment industry and well known anti-piracy lobbyists. Besides that, we argue that it is likely that the technology might slow down transfers of people who are on ISPs that don’t end up supporting the technology, raising serious Net Neutrality issues.
Let’s start off by looking at the mission statement of the P4P working group, which was founded last year. One of the key objectives of the group, quoted from their official mission statement (pdf) is as follows (emphasis added).
[to] Determine, validate, and encourage the adoption of methods for ISPs and P2P software distributors to work together to enable and support consumer service improvements as P2P adoption and resultant traffic evolves while protecting the intellectual property (IP) of participating entities
It might of course be that the P4P group included this objective to cover their asses. However, we have our doubts. For now, the technical specs give no reason to believe that the new technology will support piracy filters or other anti-piracy measures. But, when you consider that the MPAA, NBC Universal and several other representatives from the entertainment industry are members of the working group, this might very well be suggested in the next phase of the project.
One might wonder, why is the MPAA involved in all this? Obviously their agenda is to stop copyright infringement, so we have no reason to believe that they will try to steer P4P in this direction as well. This would not be a big surprise really. The P4P working group was founded by The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), a collaboration of the entertainment industry, ISPs and P2P companies. The purpose of the DCIA is clear, as we can read on their website (emphasis added):
Our number one priority clearly is the elimination of copyright infringement and, because DCIA advocates the commercial development of distributed computing (as opposed for example to trying to stop it), our key strategy centers on proliferating legitimate commercial services to displace unauthorized media file sharing currently being conducted by consumers on a massive scale.
This shows the P4P working group from a whole other perspective doesn’t it? We have no doubt that the researchers involved in this have the best of intentions, and that they really want to develop a new technology that benefits P2P users and ISPs. We also believe, however, that the MPAA and other rights holders who are part of the project, will push their agenda forward sooner of later.
The DCIA collaboration is an initiative from Hollywood’s big shots and several of the larger technology corporations. Back in 2002, both sides got together and decided that it would be a good idea to start a working group to keep an eye on future technological developments. Below, we quote a paragraph from one of the original letters (pdf) discussing the matter, signed by the CEOs of the MPAA, Walt Disney, Sony Pictures, AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal, Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer, Viacom and News America (emphasis added).
We thus propose the establishment of a new high level working group, independent or as part of an existing process, to find technical measures that limit unauthorized peer-to-peer trafficking in movies, music and other entertainment content.
And so the DCIA was born, which later started the P4P workgroup. We will leave it up to the readers to decide whether this is a serious threat or not, we will find out sooner or later anyway.
There is one other “dark” aspect of P4P we want to mention though, something that hasn’t been reported elsewhere, even though it can have some very negative consequences for P2P users.
By looking at the latest P4P research report, we come to the conclusion that P4P might slow down the downloads of people who use non-P4P clients, or those who are on an ISP that doesn’t support P4P. This is because P4P users will be more likely to share with local peers, while regular P2P users share with everyone (note that both can be in the same swarm). This goes against Net Neutrality principles, although this depends on how one defines Net Neutrality.
Since P4P prioritizes local traffic, P4P users will share less with users who do not use the technology. This will affect both the upload and the download side, but the data in the report seems to suggest that the give and take ratio is worse when P4P is enabled, so they take more from other ISPs (relatively) than they give back (mild leeching). This is most likely facilitated by the fact that upload speeds tend to be slower than download speeds.
Let’s conclude by saying that the researchers from Yale University and The University of Washington came up with a promising technology that could potentially speed up P2P downloads, at least for some users. Getting ISPs and filesharing developers to embrace this new technology will not be easy though. ISPs will sure be motivated, as it will save them money. However, we’re not so sure that BitTorrent client developers (and others) will adopt it so easily, since it might degrade performance on non P4P ISPs.
The largest threat might, as usual, “come from the anti-piracy lobby, as they will probably push for content filters or other anti-piracy measures,” says EWrnesto, adding:
“They haven’t done this so far, but to us this seems to be inevitable.”
Stay tuned.
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.Stumble It!
University of Washington - The 160-mile download diet: Local file-sharing drastically cuts network load, August 19, 2008
traffic throttling actions - Comcast gets 30 days on P2P traffic throttling, August 21, 2008
blaming P2P file sharers - p2pnet traffic shaping digest, April 19, 2008
TorrentFreak -Uncovering The Dark Side of P4P, August 24, 2008
DCIA - DCIA in Comcast ‘P2P Bill of Rights’, April 16, 2008
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August 25th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
/sigh
Once again, the main thing they are all missing (or choosing to ignore) is that fair use comes into play. Downloading a music file IS NOT ILLEGAL and it is what you do with it, or the context it is used within, that determines if a contractual (civil) obligation exists.
If I bought a CD and left it at home and I download an MP3 at work from anywhere of the songs on that CD to listen at work have I broken a law?(NO) Is that a fair use of the purchased music?(YES) If I am a journalist and I download a new MP3 of a song to publish a review and include a short soundbite, is that allowed?(YES) Can any network hardware magically know what I am going to use that song file for after I download it?(NO)
When will the RIAA/MPAA learn….this P4P thing can NOT automatically determine what your use of the download is for! Thus it will prevent even legal (e.g. fair use) and protected downloads from taking place, improperly. They need to err on the side of allowing fair use, give the consumer the benefit of the doubt, instead of so blindly and zealously attempting to protect their copyrights.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
A) you do a ping time to each peer , hte closest gets priority
the problem here is hte beginning
B)if the seed is far off , it will mean that many people all over may be required to get parts.
however its simple and easy.
C) you can even add encryption heavier then they do now, or make it httpd packet like so DPI procedures get bent.
D) these researches did absolutely nothing new. NOTHING. it is after called routing for a reason.
And if you create a protocol based on this then its easy to simply create files for it and it must be an open spec for anyone to use it effectivly, otherwise if closed , how can i send or receive via it. HOW CAN YOU, and it quickly becomes a useless tech.
ive tabled a p2p bittorent like whitepaper for a protocol when there was no encryption and i told utorrent and azureus that if they didn’t do it id go ahead ( even started a project at sourceforge ) of course this was before ludde sold out and azureus became a sellout.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
OH one other problem , it may actually do nothing at all in high volume p2p cases where you have large population bases.
500000 people in one city trying to get your file cause the protocol says so means htey going ot be real slow
what needs be done next is to spread out like a neural net
you send to one other close to you whom does same and you then to another, soon you have tons and it moves virally.
thats actually more effective. and would solve slow peer issues of massive torrents. it would also garner quicker seed bases as well.
to ensure seeding you could hold back for a period of time the very last piece until that user sent the same to another.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
oh and screw p4p as its all done by the wrong people who are too greedy
August 26th, 2008 at 1:48 am
This is all hot air, its hardly “new technology” to think of routing queries to the nearest result.
Also what p2p system delivers multiple identical copies of a file to be downloaded , only one that I know of, bit torrent, every other p2p network has no such raft of sources, most files are different in bitrate, file length and other variables than ensure the criteria for using this system is just not feasable.
I see this “news” as a simple hype to obtain startup capital, there is nothing new here when you think through whats being proposed