Uncovering The Dark Side of P4P | TorrentFreakP4P is touted as the new and improved P2P. The technology has the potential to lower bandwidth costs for ISPs and speed up downloads for P4P enabled filesharing clients. There is a dark site to this new technology though. The strong anti-piracy connections are fuel for conspiracy theorists, and Net Neutrality might be at stake.
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.
Bookmarks