Shaping traffic used to be so much simpler!

As Wired reports today, Comcast (an evil faceless corporation) recently announced that it has stopped hating on peer-to-peer filesharing and had a change of heart.  Comcast has a history of ruthlessly persecuting P2P filesharers, selectively slowing down their downloads, for one – a blatant violation of net neutrality.  Now they are trumpeting the glorious success of their tests into P2P on their network.  Why the about face?

This shouldn’t come as a total shock to people who have been following the news out of Dutch academia.  As Ars reported a few weeks ago, some European network developers have been studying the potential of P2P filesharing networks like BitTorrent to distribute the weight of heavy Internet traffic.  And Verizon, who banned P2P for some users in 2007, announced less than a year later that they were starting to test an “efficient routing system” suspiciously like P2P.

And heavy Internet traffic is what really motivates Comcast and other big enterprises into exploring this territory.  In an ideal world, they’d control everyone’s uploads and downloads through a central command, but peak traffic overloads these central trunks, causing service to slow down, and costing these companies a bundle.  The first solution Comcast tried was to selectively throttle the traffic to illegal filesharers down to a trickle, but the FCC put an end to that.  If Comcast’s series of tubes are getting plugged with traffic, the only other solution is to send the traffic elsewhere.

Peer-to-peer is great at this; it distributes source files and can connect people who want to download them to the most efficiently accessible source.  As Wired reports in the article above, in tests Verizon was able to decrease the distance between source and destination by an average 80%, and increase the speed of transfer by up to 200%.  The drawback, obviously, is that all of this is going on outside of the parent company’s control.

So why would Comcast suddenly choose to support filesharing?  Sure, it will help the congestion problems, but congestion is really the users’ problem, not the ISP’s.  The benefit to Comcast is being able to support more traffic-intensive files – like full-length movies and TV shows, which is a critical step towards the final evolution of total media on demand.  And getting the mountainous Long Tail of media off their servers costs them less in maintenance.  But why would Comcast bite the hand that feeds it content?  How will more efficient traffic help legitimate content creators if we’re all swapping files illegally?

But wait — who said anything about allowing illegal filesharing?  Sure, Comcast, Verizon, and others are looking into distributing traffic by switching to P2P, but who said anything about letting people share licenced material, willy-nilly, without paying for it?  Make no mistake — there’s a big difference between P2P filesharing and illegal P2P filesharing.  BitTorrent and their ilk allow people to submit information about their files to databases on decentralised servers (the BitTorrent trackers), which then allows people to selected a file and transfer it directly from host to end user.  The files being transferred never pass through BitTorrent’s system — only the metadata does.  If the trackers were designed to discriminate between legal files and illegal ones, and negotiate connections only between a legally hosted DRMed file and a paying end user, ISPs like Comcast and the content providers whose video they help distribute could redistribute the weight of traffic without relinquishing control over what goes where.

This comes at the cost (to us) of having trackers query our computers — essentially peering into the folder of files we’re prepared to share to see what’s legal and what’s not.  And when someone wants what we have and we start transferring our file to them, that person on the other end will be a paying customer — but what (apart from fast downloads) is our reward?  As it stands, the more files you distribute using P2P, the greater the fine the FCC will slap you with (assuming you live in the US).  If you were sharing legal files, would you be entitled to expect a similar compensation?  If Jammie Thomas had been sharing files legally, would the FCC have paid her $222,000.00, or even a 10% retailer markup, for her troubles?  I’m sceptical.

Switching to a content-provider-endorsed, ISP-sanctioned P2P network to distribute large files will benefit consumers through faster download times — but expect ISPs to be involved in every step.  Just because the files go directly from one user to another doesn’t mean that your files will flow freely, unobstructed, or unobserved.  BitTorrent users obviously don’t have too many reservations about sharing information about the content of their hard drives with BitTorrent, but will we all want to share the same information with Comcast and the FCC?