BitTorrent

No less than the open freedom of the Internet is at stake in the war over net neutrality. Now FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has waded into the fray with two new proposals and a clear message: an open and nondiscriminatory Internet is a must for the future.

That stance emerged today in Genachowski's address at the Brookings Institute in Washington. He laid out problems such as the limited competition among ISPs, the economic incentives for ISPs to sell bundled phone and TV service with Internet, and the burden of growing Internet traffic that puts pressure back on ISPs.

Over the long weekend, the servers of the Internet TV site Revision3.com were brought down by what is called a "denial-of-service" attack (DoS)—one of the most common methods used to disrupt the operations of a Web site or server by flooding it with an overload of simultaneous connections. These attacks are not uncommon, but in a fascinating blog post written by Revision3's CEO Jim Louderback today, he reveals that the source of this particular attack was not a pimply basement hacker with a grudge, but a major anti-piracy organization called MediaDefender whose clients include all the major entertainment companies and the RIAA. The hitch? Revision3 is a perfectly legitimate business that does not deal in pirated content.

When DSL and cable first arrived, ISPs abandoned the per-hour dial-up access billing model for unlimited bandwidth at a flat rate fee. Recently, Comcast has come under fire for shaping its traffic (read: blocking) while maintaining its unlimited contract with users. Lawsuits have been threatened and the FCC has been stirred to comment. The issue at hand is the peer-to-peer file sharing networks. While their user bases account for a very small percentage of the total Internet audience, the traffic they generate is said to account for anywhere between 50 and 90 percent of all data.

A: One critical difference between the Web and TV is how they scale. TV scales nicely—it costs the same to air a show to 10 viewers as it does to a million. On the Web, distributing a file to a million users at once is nearly a million times as costly (and slower) as delivering it to one.


BitTorrent, an open-source peer-to-peer parallel downloading tool written by Bram Cohen, changes the equation: The more popular a file is, the easier it becomes to fetch and the cheaper it becomes to serve.