Pitfalls for ISP-friendly P2P design

Peer-to-peer file sharing applications have become enormously popular over the past few years, coming to represent a large fraction of wide-area Internet traffic. A side effect of this explosive growth has been an emerging tussle between users, who want fast downloads, and ISPs, whose flat-rate pricing business model is threatened by the extreme volume of P2P traffic. Because ISP costs scale with usage while their prices do not, many ISPs have attempted to throttle or shut down P2P systems. Recently, several researchers have proposed that this tussle is unnecessary, that small changes in client and/or protocol behavior can lead to a “win-win" solution of better performance for end-users with less wide-area traffic for ISPs. Using a very large scale trace measurement of BitTorrent usage, we find evidence that such a win-win outcome is unlikely for at least one very popular P2P protocol.

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