Kyle Brady, a computer science student, sends us, "a critique of a major IEEE article by Lawrence G. Roberts where he automatically assumes P2P traffic is illegal, unwanted, and should be filtered – then develops the technology to do so."
Consider, for a moment, the issue most often cited for "traffic shaping", the practice of filtering a users traffic based on the type and source: legality of content. While there is an abundance of content with questionable copyright origins based on the current interpretations of the DMCA (in America), there is also a sea of legal content being acquired by the same means: Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and a number of other musical artists have experimented with a freely available online distribution method, in addition to countless young movie producers that are only interested in their content being available and seen.
How can network monitoring practices differentiate between "legal" and "illegal" P2P traffic? Filtering by content source, such as a band's official website vs. IsoHunt, is impractical – the content available via the official source is likely licensed for free distribution and sharing by other means. Filtering by traffic size, as in number of bytes transferred, is a gray area at best – setting an arbitrary size for acceptable P2P traffic, or any type of traffic, creates artificial pricing levels, not to mention potentially endorsing the acquisition of questionably sourced content. There is really only one option left, and it is what most ISPs choose in such cases: filter by traffic type.
I've never understood the ISP/admin approach to P2P that says, "We've provided you with a pipe so you can access the Internet, but stop accessing the Internet so much!" If users want P2P, then P2P is what makes paying for an ISP valuable, so why would ISPs want to reduce its availability? That's like a phone company that discovers that teenagers use phones to send a lot of texts to one another, overwhelming their capacity (based on assumptions about how much text users will want to send) who then throttles text-sending rather than changing their assumptions about use-patterns.
Incorrect Base Assumptions About Network Management
(Thanks, Kyle!)
