Wednesday, February 9, 2011
P2P traffic is very obvious to ISPs
Just had another thought, P2P traffic is extremely easy to identify and ISPs are increasingly doing more network management to "optimize" or "prioritize" their network and that's not going to stop. People can fight about net neutrality all they want (and I support net neutrality) and I know deep down, you can't tell ISPs how to run their network and once everyone does it, it will become standard. But ISPs can easily block services like Gnutella, Bittorent, FreeNet, emule, and so on quite easily. They have not done it because they dont want to scare away customers. Sadly though, as we all move to the cloud, all services will become web services and web services run on well known web ports (80. 8080, 443). The minute ISPs notice that they can block P2P traffic by essentially only allowing said ports, and still retain a good customer base, they will do it. They may even start charging users to enable other ports and UDP, the same way you currently have to pay more if you want to unblock ports 80, 22, 25, and other ports. But yeah, P2P traffic is obvious, why else would there be a TCP connection between two Cox customers or a Cox and Comcast customer with an average throughput of 20+ KB. I fear it's a sad future for P2P and maybe 10 years from today it may be impossible to run any P2P application. Maybe I'm being too cynical, I tend to get like that sometimes, but that's my defense mechanism to prepare for the worst.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment