cobolhacker.com

I liked the article, but Ou is wrong on a couple of things.

For starters, opening up lots of multiple upload streams is not ‘cheating’. It may be exploiting a design weakness in TCP, but this is a fair cry from ‘cheat’. A cheat would be a piece of software that makes people’s routers go offline when you want to download porn. What software like bittorrent does is simply allow the end user to better maximize the connection given to him. Maybe in George’s world the Internet company said, “George, I know you like downloads, but don’t oversubscribe…” but they didn’t say that to me.

My Internet company told me in their marketing that I would receive ‘unlimited’ Internet. It is not wrong for me to want to use the service I pay for all the way to the max, all the time. I’m sorry if TCP is broke fellas, but that’s what we’re routing, so suck it up. I don’t feel sorry for them if they didn’t or couldn’t provision their network to handle it better because they could not anticipate need. If they really thought it was a problem, they would have told me that they sometimes shape traffic for performance reasons and not try to deny it like cowards (I’m talking about you Sympatico!) Or they would have told me that my Internet was ‘limited’ in some way.

Of course, the Internet company I’m with did provision properly and doesn’t feel the need to throttle me (or if they do they’re not knocking my torrents all the way down to 30KBps like Sympatico does). In fact, if they asked me to back off the bittorrent a bit during the evening because resources were getting tight, I would, because I respect them for at least trying to give me that maximum. And as for the tiered suppliers beyond that: screw you and route my packets. Get your boffins out and figure out how to do this better because this is what you get paid for. The only thing you get paid for. (see below)

Also Ou’s little tirade about metred pricing is also a little off (and perhaps insulting, didn’t have to lay into the EFF like that, guy). The Australian example he provides is flawed and doesn’t take into account any of the factors that make that market go like geographic distances or the cost of maintaining undersea, international Internet connections to a far off place like Australia. I’ll admit that I don’t know what those factors are either, but I think it is way too simplistic to declare that Internet is more expensive in Australia simply because it is metered. Besides, the free market that everyone worships so much in the U.S. should take care of keeping the prices down, and if it doesn’t because the incumbent Telcos and Cablecos aren’t down with it then well maybe it is time to break out the regulation bat and smack some asses into line like we have here in Canada. Every other service with limited delivery capability like water and gas charges by the unit, I don’t see why this wouldn’t work with Internet. At the very least it might make bittorrent users think twice about downloading a 15GB HD rip of something.

Having got all that off my chest, the work of Mr. Briscoe that Ou is reporting on is still interesting. Even as an avid bittorrent user (always for legal uses, really) I don’t really have a problem with finding a way to level out the net amount of bandwidth users get to play with, even if that slows my torrents down a tad. Torrents really aren’t time critical, particularly the seeding of them. The current implementation of TCP does allow a P2P user to inadvertently out-muscle someone who only uses the Internet to read his email or watch Youtube because that’s just how it works. From what I’ve read so far, Briscoe’s idea is fairly content neutral and protocol neutral, which is what matters to me.

So I guess I’ve refined my position over the last little while, and if Bennet ever finds me again I suppose he’s entitled to say, “I told you so.” I still think that ISPs need to provision their networks appropriately, because demand does not disappear on its own. P2P is the media delivery solution of the future and it likes lots of bandwidth. You must plan for this and more. But I am coming around on the idea that better traffic control is required on the Internet because it is too easy to develop P2P applications that gobble up everything they can. You can simulate this at home by telling bittorrent to go full out on the upload (as some clients do). The rest of your surfing will crawl. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still very much about network neutrality, but now I’m thinking more along the lines of protocol neutrality (you don’t discriminate how I transfer my data) and content neutrality (you don’t discriminate what data I transfer). But at the same time I don’t want to be a jerk and flog a link to the point that someone can’t watch their Youtube or whatever and if tweaking TCP so that it can compensate somewhat for the innate greediness of my P2P software then maybe that’s acceptable.

Of course, monster-sized links would fix this too, but since that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, I suppose a comprise will have to do in the meantime.