Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Uncovering The Dark Side of P4P (torrentfreak.com)
6 points by nickb on Aug 24, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments


Eh. There are already passive "P4P" type tools for carriers, but they are not commonplace or widespread yet. Except for AT&T trying their level best to forego common carrier status, I don't think any ISP wants to get in the business of discriminating anyone's traffic (every big ISP probably has some subsection of their marketing department that thinks this is a good idea, but the people at the top know where their bread is buttered and shut this stuff down pretty fast).

So long as common carrier status is generally recognized, this should legally look no different than an ISP that uses a web cache or web accelerator technology.

Everybody has to maintain the perception that they're not building some giant napster-in-the-sky that is going to crush the ?IAAs, but everyone who is doing technical work knows what data goes across the internet and knows the usefulness of this product is relative to what percentage of the peer-peer data it can carry.


ISPs aren't common carriers now.

P4P doesn't involve any discrimination by the ISPs, since it merely provides hints to P2P apps about which peers are faster. As several people have pointed out, there's no point in providing misleading hints, since it would just cause P2P apps to ignore them altogether.


好的, I've been itching for a good arms race. We won round 2 much too easily & everything's stagnated.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: