Mark Cuban Calls on ISPs to Block P2P 463
boaz112358 writes "Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner, HDNet CEO, and noted gadfly is publishing on his blog that Comcast and other ISPs should block all P2P traffic, because as he says, "As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders." He complains that commercial content distributors instead of paying for their own bandwidth, are leeching off consumers who are paying for the bandwidth. As an alternative distribution method (at least for audio and video), he suggests Google video."
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Re:One way to solve this (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Want VPN? Upgrade to business class. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the term "business class" means something else when you're a student at a uni.
Anyway, this is a horrible idea. ISPs should just make sure they have enough bandwidth to satisfy everyone at peak time. Not doing so is called being cheap and nasty.
In Australia we have monthly download quotas, which some people hate but seems to actually be a good solution. If you want to P2P 200 gigs a month you can, but you're going to pay a lot more for your access than someone who wants to do 10 gigs a month over their company's VPN. Also, you have a well-defined limit to work to; I've seen quite a few posts here about some ISPs having a seemingly undefined "limit" after which they start asking you to curb your net usage. But if you ask them what they consider acceptable you'll never get an answer, because it's always changing. So, I might only get 40 gigs a month on my account, but I know I'll always be able to use it at full speed because my ISP ensures they have enough capacity to handle peak periods.
There is of course money to be made by catering to the heavy downloaders who don't care too much about performance, by selling them cheap accounts with heavily overcommitted bandwidth. But if you're doing that without being upfront about it, then you're cheap and nasty; and it shouldn't be the norm. If you pay for a X mbit/sec connection, that's what you should get, and the only time you shouldn't get the full throughput is if the host you're receiving data from can't handle it.
Re:One way to solve this (Score:5, Funny)
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Here is the way I see it. College universities can set it up so filesharing, and other heavy bandwidth activities, get lower prioritization. I don't know how this is done, if some universities do it by port number.
Of course, there isn't a catch-all sort of thing. Of course some will figure out a way around prioritizations. For the most part, if a university does have that kind of policy and filters set up, I would hope students respect their decision. Either that o
Re:One way to solve this (Score:5, Insightful)
They should not use the access they're paying for, but instead should go pay another internet provider also? That sounds fair. And by fair, I mean utterly stupid. It's not like you get to choose not to pay your inet fee - most schools either require it or bury it in other fees anyway, so even if you DO pay for your own inet access, you're just double or triple-paying. How about when you pay for internet access, you get to... I know this is crazy... access the internet? If it's too slow for Mark Cuban, he's welcome to run his own, faster network and put whatever policies he wants in to place to govern it. He has enough money. But he, you, and everyone else can stay the fuck out of my internet usage, thank you.
Re:One way to solve this (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's more that people don't care how ISPs make their money. It's not my problem if an ISP offers a product which they're unable to make a profit on, any more than it's my problem if a store mis-prices an item and sells it a loss.
ISPs have been telling everyone that bandwidth is cheap, by selling X mbit at Y$ per month. "Use it as much as you want and that's all you'll pay", they say. Now they're complaining that their customers actually think their $Y per month entitles them to X mbit of bandwidth. Gee, I wonder why that is?
If you sell an internet connection as an unlimited service, people are going to use it as an unlimited service. If you can't actually provide that, then don't sell it! IMHO, if an ISP that sells you an unlimited X mbit connection and then tells you you're using it too much, it should be an open-and-shut case of false advertising. They're entering into a contract with you without being able to fulfil their side of it.
In the internet backwaters of Australia, ISPs used to offer unlimited access plans on dialup. The low bandwidth of dialup meant that this was kind of feasible, because there's only so much you can download at 56k. When ADSL started coming out, they went to a quota system, because even a couple of hundred kilobits per second can add up to a crapload of data if left going 24/7, and data from overseas costs a lot.
So now I'm paying for 40 gigs of traffic on an ADSL2 link at ~ 19mbit down, 1mbit up. Sure, it's only 40 gigs, but they're my 40 gigs. I can do whatever I want with that and not worry about being throttled because my ISP doesn't approve of particular types of traffic.
There are ISPs here which offer cheaper prices for a much higher quota (and even some offering unlimited quotas at low speeds, i.e. 256kbit). I'm with a more expensive ISP because the cheaper ones heavily oversubscribe and that means you often get poor performance during peak periods. I don't have a problem with ISPs providing such a service; there's people who want to download a lot but don't really care if sometimes (or often) websites are slow to load. It's only a problem if they try to hide the fact that they do this.
Re:One way to solve this (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting comment... (Score:5, Insightful)
What you are referring to is breaking of network neutrality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality).
******
The principle of net neutrality and regulations designed to support the neutrality of the Internet have been subject to fierce debate in various forums. Since the early 2000s, advocates of net neutrality rules have warned of the danger that broadband providers will use their power over the "last mile" to block applications they oppose, and also to discriminate between content providers (e.g. websites, services, protocols), particularly competitors.
******
So if universities do priorization, why not corporations, why not ISP's?
A slippery slope....
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Because a university is a private network. Same with a business. Your house is also a private network.
So if I do priorization in my own home, why not corporations, why not ISP's?
Do you want the government telling you that you can't prioritize you WOW session over you daughters MySpace traffic?
When there is only one choice of ISP in a given area, that ISP becomes a public utility, not a private university, company or home. This is whe
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Some facts:
Real fans pay for music.
Poor fans won't pay for music whether it is easily available or not.
And if there wasn't any demand, then there wouldn't be any supply.
The market will work itself out despite DRM and the like.
Re:One way to solve this (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm all for supporting artists, but I won't support the RIAA and bullshit business tactics to do it. I stick to music from people I know or discover and that I can buy directly from them or an outlet similar to CDBaby.
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A major ISP in the city I resided in in Romania help alleviate demands on bandwidth to and from the outside world by just setting up a DC++ server for their customers where they could share music and movies with other people in the same city. Seems easier to do than trying to ban all manner of P2P traffic. Too bad that sort of thing would never fly in the U.S.
Yeah, that would never fly in the U.S., sadly, but I wonder if there are types of caching systems that would work, if they operated on the lower network levels and didn't care what type of traffic they were caching.
Maybe you could put together some system that was more general than HTTP caching proxies like Squid, that analyzed outgoing requests on all ports and protocols and the subsequent responses, and cached both. If you got multiple requests going out for the same piece of content, it could intercept
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Apart from those legal issues I doubt the possibility of implementing a protocol-agnostic proxy. Firstly, a huge amount of AI would ne
hold on a sec... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hold on a sec... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:hold on a sec... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not quite sure he meant that it isn't a users right to use P2P if they chose... but instead he wishes to prevent companies from using your bandwidth for free, for their monetary gain.
The attack on all P2P i think was a unintended target and just poor wording on his case.
I might be wrong on this.
My view is that P2P is a users right. They can do what they want with the bandwidth they pay for. But companies that charge you to download again lets say movies from them through a P2P system, should not expect to use my bandwidth for free, so that they can in return profit, and charge me for it.
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He clearly doesnt't specialise in clear thinking though. He seems to think that blocking p2p would improve his own internet experience (at the expense of many other perople's of course, but that doesn't bother him). He seems to think that his own improved experience will come about because blocking p2p will reduce the amount of traffic flowing through the internet. The fact that all that p2p traffic is people downl
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Clearly this is just him being a supporter of IP laws and wanting to join the MAFIAA party line.
Isn't Ironic....? (Score:2)
Just imagine how fast the internet would be... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just imagine how fast the internet would be... (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing else, just ping.
There's part of me that would pay for that.
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Actually, I kinda like that idea. If traffic shaping is in place, ICMP probably would be in the low-latency, low-throughput group; perfect for "tunneling" IRC, IM protocols and the like.
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From the ISS X-Force Database...
LOKI is a client/server program published in the online publication Phrack. This program is a working proof-of-concept to demonstrate that data can be transmitted somewhat secretly across a network by hiding it in traffic that normally does not contain payloads. The example code can tunnel the equivalent of a Unix RCMD/RSH session in either ICMP echo request (ping) packets or UDP traffic to the DNS port. This is used as a back door into a Unix system after root access has been compromised. Presence of LOKI on a system is evidence that the system has been compromised in the past.
http://xforce.iss.net/xforce/xfdb/1452 [iss.net]
Re:hold on a sec... (Score:5, Interesting)
And really, if you are only using the internet for shell access and to get your email account and refresh drudgereport, then what the hell are you bitching and moaning about needing high speed for in the first place?!
And really, if an internet provider wants to give HTTP, POP, IMAP and shell traffic top priority, that's fine with me. That way those packets will not be affected should a heavy load of other use throttle the connection -- and at the same time, a bunch of people just using HTTP and shell accounts isn't going to slow down your P2P or streaming activities by any noticeable amount.
I don't see why all of this is a big deal. And I don't see why my solution isn't good enough. It allows the content of the supposed majority of users to always get through unimpeded while allowing all other content to cross the wires as the remaining bandwidth (which is supposedly the other 90% of traffic) allows.
Cuban is a hot-headed little prick.
Re:hold on a sec... BINGO!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
And this would make the big guys very happy. I wonder if our Mr. Cuban is a big guy or a small guy these days...
all the best,
drew
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P2P is only int its infancy (Score:5, Insightful)
P2P is only in its infancy. More and more applications are being found for it. Joost is one example, where p2p is used in a way to allow a relatively small player to operate. New uses even bring bandwidth use down, keeping it local.
It would be stupid to kill these opportunities for the benefit of a few big players.
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The amount of traffic to send remains nearly same, for a centralized model or for a P2P-model. P2P just has some additional traffic for organisation, but it is not so much that you could call P2P administrative traffic the bandwidth hog to end all Internet.
So if Mark Cuban gets his way, and all traffic is only mail and http, then still his Internet Tubes[tm] are clogged by people downloading... just this time it's from YouPorn or AllOfMP3's granddaughter.
When my university had only a
Freeloaders? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Just FYI.
Also FYI (Score:3, Interesting)
He isn't gunning for P2P because he actually thinks it's a bad thing, but because it has the potential to bring high definition programming to anyone with a net connection... which would directly compete with his HD cable network offerings.
It's be vastly cheaper to offern HD content over a 'secure' P2P application instead of building up the infrastructure or business relations in order to offer it through traditional channels.
*"The first all-high definition national
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Re:Freeloaders? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And if their customer wants to download web pages in seconds but doesn't want to download GB of porn/p2p whatever?
The problem ISPs are having is that they don't want to impose hard limits on how much their customers can download each month because (almost) everybody's usage varies from month to month. A customer (me) who might download 2Gb/month usually might then suddenly download 5Gb in a few hours (new Debian release)
I ev
Re:Freeloaders? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mmm.. though I agree, I think he has a point... although his approach didn't quite nail it. It all comes down to a matter of whether or not it's 'abuse'. I don't really see P2P downloading as abuse, but I could see how beancounters could interpret it that way. Their infrastructure wasn't built to support it. So, people are working outside of the bounds they set, and it's interferring with
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Or perhaps they should sell their bandwidth differently. Some people want a really high-speed connection for instant response time and occasional large transfers, others want to use all the bandwidth they can get 24/7. The two could be charged differently for their usage. Sell different plans with the same connection speed but different limits on maximum monthly usage. When someone g
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Re:Freeloaders? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or at least to whomever's ISPs promised them service. That's the real problem here, the overselling of backhaul capacity and quoting of mindless 'burst' speeds rather than average or continuous transfer. What everyone is doing with their connection is irrelevant. If I'm downloading porn or watching YouTube, the effect on my neighbors is going to be basically the same (witness most recent 'imminent death of the net' story, which IIRC blamed video).
We need a little more truth in advertising in internet access. Let's make them advertise two separate figures, one for speed and one for transfer, for starters. And if they're going to do QoS or prioritize traffic, that needs to be disclosed, too -- not just that they're going to do it, but on what basis they're going to do the QoS and a breakdown of what traffic is going to get what priority over what else.
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Deregulations for c
Re:Freeloaders? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you know how long it takes to download film in Sweden? 15-30min. Why? Because somebody invested in fiber to homes and fast switches. That's the reason they have ethernet straight to home. Yes, ethernet socket at home, 10/10Mb, upgradeable to 100/100.
And of course everybody knows that if your infrastructure is designed properly most of the traffic will stay local - p2p client usually prefer local fast nodes.
So you pay for your 'net connection - it gives you possibility to download whatever you want, everybody can. You can download newest Fedora, but your neighbour probably sits 12 hours a day watching youtube. Same IMHO.
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They have this in China too. I've yet to hear of a 100Mbps connection though.
Of course, if you follow the wire, it goes straight into a 10Mbps hub, together with several others, and that hub is plugged into another one/etc/etc. It works fine if you use it during the day
It doesn't sound like your ethernet plug has quite the same infrastructure behind it though...(having said that, I heard they are laying fibre along every road now, as a rule).
Max.
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You have a business relationship with the ISP, who has a responsibility to provide you (and your neighbor) with the service you pay both for. How they achieve that is none of your business, and certainly not on your conscience. If they can't provide a service that's up to standard (such as putting you on separate backbone switches if necessary), then they shouldn't offer said services, and
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Paying Customer? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is getting silly..... ISPs should NOT be advertising services they can not actually provide and then blaming groups of their own customers for their lack of infrastructure.
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"Ok... so now paying customers who buy a service as it is advertised are freeloaders?"
He means this in the sense that while you might pay Comcast a monthly fee for bandwidth, you're using that bandwidth to get free movies, games and music that are otherwise being offered for sale. Yes, I'm aware that some people use BitTorrent only for legitimate purposes, but he's addressing the other 99%.
"This is getting silly..... ISPs should NOT be advertising services they can not actually provide and then blami
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Mr. Cheapskate asks for more. (Score:3, Insightful)
All ISPs offer a "shared bandwidth" plan where they tell you that you will be sharing the bandwidth at the last mile, with your neighbors. And if you want to have fast guaranteed unshared access, they offer a dedicated "bandwidth connection" for a premium fee, where only you get the full bandwidth and if it is any lower than promised average, you can actually complain to the ISP and get it fixed, or even possibly sue them for not providing ser
Internet Experience (Score:3, Funny)
How exactly ? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a battle that cannot be won, unless the whole Internet is shut down. Most people in the content business would like to regulate P2P like TV or shut it down like unregulated radio, but unlike these media, P2P doesn't require more equipment or knowledge than ordinary citizen already possess in order to be able to broadcast.
The cat is out of the bag, and the clever ones will take advantage of it. The others will fight to the bitter end and lose, as always.
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They could make life on ports 22 and 443 and using conventional protocols like HTTPS and SSH really obnoxious, but you can't just ban all encry
obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
As a billionaire... (Score:2)
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Depends on the country... (Score:5, Informative)
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Even within a particular company there's no consistency; some people have been bumped or throttled by Comcast at 80GB/mo, but other people can do twice that forever and don't get into trouble. It's all based on factors that you as the
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My guess is that this happens totally at random.
Google video requires no bandwidth (Score:4, Insightful)
Or wait... why was it that this P2P concept was invented again? "Distribute load" or something... difficult concept.
Try again Mark.
Freeloaders? (Score:2)
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The Free Market Can Handle This (Score:2)
The thing is, if this were lucrative, Comcast would have done it by now. The market can take care of itself on things like this. I can guara
Nonsensical (Score:5, Funny)
Who are the Dallas Mavericks?
Indeed - maybe he should stick to whatever the hell he's good at, and leave the ISP stuff up to those that actually know what they're talking about.
The irony... (Score:2)
As a consumer... (Score:2)
Who cares? (Score:2)
He took that money and bought a bunch of toys, a basketball team, and appeared in some crappy tv. How this makes him an expert in technology is beyond me.
A troll trolling is by definition not news.
Internet fame, the Dvorak way (Score:2)
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Somebody block that guys mail. (Score:2)
Internet was so great before 1993 [wikipedia.org].
What he suggests is theoretically possible... (Score:2)
If all ISP's essentially "NAT'ted" every residential subscriber with no port forwarding. Receiving data on a TCP stream would work just fine, since you would initiate that, as would receiving data via UDP when it's on a port that the host computer made a previous recent request on (and most likely also only from the same IP).
Subscribers that need "direct net" connections would have to pay commercial rates, which would probably radically cut into how much P2P sharing goes on.
It wouldn't totally stop it
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Of course you could place a server in between where both have to sign in to be present, but first of all this would definitly increase traffic (and if I got that person correctly, that's his main concern, because it would cut into his precious traffic) and, well, servers cost money.
meanwhile (Score:2, Interesting)
Americans just don't care. They don't see what we "could" have and suffice what we do have. Cable, DSL, FIOS are all be
My ISP (Score:5, Informative)
(in english):
And it's dirt cheap too. 100mbit both directions, full duplex for 200SEK a month, or ~$15.
Why yes, I AM a bastard
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Here in Austria we have similar prices to the USA. However by all accounts the bit torrent traffic is not throttled.
Unfortunately I cannot get connected because the previous tenant at my flat did not pay his bill. So they say they will connect us up once we pay the 500EU outstanding, but don't worry you get 300EU back when you return the modem and router! So wanky ISP is not just a USA thing.
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Since I'm renting my apartment second hand, I got whatever internet connection was there previously. Thankfully, this is a "city network" that covers just the area I live in, but runs mostly through fiber and cat5 LANs. The fact that my entire building is on the same subnet means that I can't share folders or printers between my computers though. I get 5 IP addresses through DHCP, so a rout
He's right in his complaint, but wrong conclusion (Score:4, Informative)
What's wrong here is that ISPs want to sell you some fat pipe (to somehow justify being quite expensive for often very little service), but don't want you to use it. They expect you to be a "burst" user. Download a page in 2 seconds, then look at the page for 5 minutes, then flip to the next... and so on. Yes, that's 10mbit you get. For two seconds. And you get it because everyone else is also expected to do that.
They don't expect you to use those 10mbit constantly, permanently, 24/7. But that's as what it is being sold. They promise you 10mbit, but they don't want you to use it.
They're overselling by magnitudes, and of course that doesn't work out in the long run when people actually (gasp!) use what they're being sold. How dare they!
So instead of telling people how to use their internet connection (what makes your traffic more important than mine, btw?), how about telling ISPs to sell only what they got?
Re:He's right in his complaint, but wrong conclusi (Score:2)
Fair point. I've got an idea though. It's not original though, just a patch on another fraudulent system.
How about every ISP is required to join a national ISP. This ISP doesn't sell bandwidth to the public, just to individual ISPs. Let's call it the Federal Reserve Bandwidth ISP. But that doesn't mean it is owned by the government, it should be own
Okay, how does $500 a month sound? (Score:3, Informative)
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The point is not that I want 500mbit for 5 bucks a month and if you can't do that go to hell because we want it. What I want is honesty. I want ISPs to sell what they can sell.
Our ISPs currently outbid each other with promises of bandwidth. 2m, 4m, 8m... but what you really get is less and less every time. I had 2mbit, and I could use 2mbit. Then I was promised 4mbit, and I got 1.5mbit actually. Now we're at 8mbit and on a good day, I get 1mbit. I fear when they promise 16mbit, I can't get a c
Will the real Mark Cuban, please stand up? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, (Score:2)
P2P is being used more and more, Blizzard uses bittorrent to distribute every wow patch and has done so for years now.
If anything, we need more real world legitimate reasons for P2P to prove its crazy to shut it down.
please don't feed the trolls (Score:3, Informative)
So no TCP/IP then? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about legitimate P2P sites? (Score:3, Insightful)
And not just software - p2p is critical to the ability of independent musicians to distribute downloads of their music. For example, Jamendo [jamendo.com] offers Creative Commons music from thousands of artists via BitTorrent and eMule.
I'm such a musician - I offer BitTorrent downloads of my music [geometricvisions.com]. If (Heaven forbid!) I got slashdotted, the torrents would keep me from being bankrupted by bandwidth bills, as would be the case if I only offered HTTP downloads.
In light of his position... (Score:4, Interesting)
In light of that perhaps we should conclude that all free thinking people should boycott his wonderful Dallas Mavericks and any of his other businesses.
It is a wonder he can't afford his own T3 or at least T1.
The big boys don't like it too much when the little boys get to play the game at all. They don't want the advantage their wealth brings them, they want the game all to themselves. No thanks.
all the best,
drew
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Also, even if they hosted it on websites rather than getting it redistributed for free by consumers then you're suddenly either going to get a load of extra content on You Tube/Google Videos and the like (which will req
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