Recently Sweden passed the local IPRED law. The law allows copyright holders to force ISPs to reveal details of users sharing files. It is understood that the Internet traffic dropped by more than 30% immediately after the law came into effect. Sweden is also the home of most popular File Sharing website “The Pirate Bay” having 22 million users. A court in Sweden has jailed the owners of The Pirate Bay in a landmark case, found guilty of breaking copyright law. Most administrators believe that tougher laws can prevent file sharing, but I do not agree. Internet piracy is cross border as most of the Content is hosted in the countries where IPR violations go unnoticed.
Infringement of copyright is not the only problem posed by peer networks. Peer networks have longer session time, massive redundancy of data and inefficient use of bandwidth. Falling storage prices and browser assisted web accelerators are adding fuel to the fire. What can the ISP’s do? Not all the countries are equipped with Cyber laws and enforcement capabilities. ISP can fix the leaking taps but not a hole in a dam!
It is not easy to filter peer networks. QoS based filtering and Deep Packet Inspection devices provide first level of defense against abnormal traffic patterns. However with improvements in HTML based peer networking methods the blending of p-2-p traffic makes it very difficult to be blocked at traffic shaping.
Consider a situation where every end user’s upstream demand starts growing. This demand is stochastic (random) process and the networks are not designed to uplift heavy data from multiple sources. From a network design perspective, the caching & retransmitting data at end-user client/browser will cause reverse flooding of the network core. In that respect Torrents or any kind of web-client based accelerator have worst bandwidth efficiency performance. The impact of IP Networks is lot more significant for upload traffic than download traffic. The ISP's resort to selective blocking of sites, traffic patterns, etc leading to significant public ire for "censorship" of content.
Can ISP's not exploit the opportunity in this challenge? Here are a few suggestions for ISP to consider for plumbing the Torrents:
A) Fix the leaking tap: Adopt asymmetric charging model. Typically user gets more downstream bandwidth than upstream. ISP put lot of focus on downstream charging plans based on download speed, speed-on-demand, gigabytes to unlimited downloads per month, rate plans based on the time-of-the-day or day-of-the-week etc. We need to devise tools to measure and publish “Upstream Leverage Factor”. This factor will determine sustainable upstream traffic per user in the network. The operators can use this factor to devise data charging plan for upstream data usage. There will be a limit set on the upstream data usage the operator can charge fee for this limit. If ISPs make uploading to be paid service the dynamics of file-sharing and peer networks will change in more than one ways.
B) Building Dams: Since most of the ISP’s are in pure bandwidth selling, they do not consider investing in content distribution as a viable business option. If the users are paying for upstream bandwidth, there is a clear business case for creating storage networks. Content storage capacity can be built on access aggregation points. Flash memory price, foot print and storage capacity are at the sweet-spot to build Terabytes of distributed storage networks, without having to invest in centralized data centers. The ISP’s can sell storage space to web service providers as well. E.g. Personal Picture Library can purchase network storage hosted by ISP and offer free uploading service to their users.
C) Make channels: The uploading of user data can be divided into "syndicated" and "user generated". The syndicated data uploading is done by authorized agents of content distributor’s networks of web service providers. Authorized agents will invest in setting up high speed connection and storage capacity. The ISP can offer hosted content management services to syndicate partners. It will force bandwidth intensive websites like YouTube, Flikr to either make end users pay for bandwidth or develop distributor network of partners who will pay the ISP for uploading User Generated content.
I believe that these methods can effectively curb the peer to peer file sharing menace without having to send anyone to jail!
