Daily Debrief: Defusing a P2P crisis before it starts
One of the Internet's pioneers is floating an interesting idea about how to fix network overload caused by peer-to-peer file transfers.
The backlash against BitTorrent is only beginning. Mark Cuban and others have raised the idea of charging for upstream bandwidth usage. That's not a popular suggestion but when 5 percent of the people using the Internet are hogging up to 80 percent of its capacity because of P2P transfers, then there's going to be trouble in River City.
Happy to say that there may be a technology answer to the problem. Dr. Lawrence Roberts, who invented computing networking via data packets, gave a talk at the recently concluded Structure 08 conference. I chatted on today's Daily Debrief with Webware's Rafe Needleman, who covered Roberts' speech.