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[ NNSquad ] Re: Comments on NNSquad Purpose


Brett Glass wrote:

It's not how BitTorrent works. With BitTorrent, you have to send at
least as much as you receive, so the total bandwidth each client uses
is at least doubled. BitTorrent is designed to offload bandwidth
demand, and possibly speed up the transfer, by co-opting bandwidth
from other ISPs bandwidth. It does not conserve bandwidth; in fact,
it wastes it because there is no opportunity for caching as there is
with HTTP.

I think you should take a closer look at how Bit Torrent really works. Read its design documents, experiment with it and observe it in action instead of leaping to conclusions based on misconceptions.


If you set up a Bit Torrent seed, i.e., a node with a full copy of a file to be shared, and other nodes want that file, they will establish ad-hoc connections to each other and to the seed. They tell each other which pieces of the file they have and begin exchanging those pieces among themselves until everyone has the whole file.

An important feature of the algorithm is that peers place priority on getting the "scarcest" pieces of a file, i.e., those pieces with the fewest total copies in the swarm. Obviously there has to be at least one copy of every piece somewhere in the swarm, i.e., at the seed, or the transfer cannot succeed.

Whenever the seed sends a piece, at least two copies of it then exist in the swarm. It has become less scarce than the pieces the seed has yet to send to anyone, so the peers become much more likely to ask the seed for pieces it has yet to send to anyone.

The effect is that the seed tends to send only one copy of each piece and the peers tend to share it among themselves instead of each asking the seed for their own copies. This makes much better use of the seed's limited upstream bandwidth.

Isn't this better for the seed's ISP than to ban Bit Torrent and force him to send a full copy to each and every recipient?

It's certainly possible for Bit Torrent seeds to send out multiple copies. A new peer might arrive, grab a complete copy, and then disappear before it has repaid its debt by passing on a full copy to someone else. The user might do this himself, or his misguided ISP might be interfering with the protocol. Either way, the effect is to shift the burden back to the original seeder and to any additional seeders.

Bit Torrent is actually quite cacheable. The ISPs merely set up Bit Torrent nodes of their own. Because they will have a fast outbound capability, peers will prefer to receive from them than from peers or seeds on user access links. If each ISP sets up a Bit Torrent node of its own, this will have the further beneficial effect of minimizing the traffic between those ISPs.

I'm sure that the Bit Torrent folks would be quite happy to work with the ISPs to build a special purpose Bit Torrent package optimized for caching purposes, e.g., by automatically participating in every torrent it sees. It has also been suggested that the Bit Torrent folks would be willing to work with the ISPs on peer selection algorithms that minimize their costs. This will require information from the ISPs and, of course, a cooperative rather than an adversary attitude.

Another way that the ISPs could make Bit Torrent more efficient is to (finally) implement IP multicasting. Without it, a sort of "packet conservation law" exists; for someone to receive a data packet, someone else has to send it. With IP multicasting, one data packet sent up a slow DSL or cable access link could be duplicated and sent to multiple receivers in such a way that usage of ISP resources is minimized.

Without multicasting or other assistance from the ISPs, users have no choice but to transmit every data packet themselves over their own slow uplinks. The ISPs have no one to blame but themselves for this unfortunate situation.

Very few people would send out baby pictures via BitTorrent. By far,
the absolutely overwhelming majority of BitTorrent traffic is pirated
music, video, movies, and software.

That may be true, but it is still not 100%. 100% of my own Bit Torrent traffic is entirely legal, and I strongly resent the implication that I "must" be engaging in piracy simply because of the protocol I choose to move my material.


I'm a service provider who is trying to make sure my customers get
good service. My customers want me to prioritize real time traffic
and de-prioritize non-interactive traffic such as file downloads.
What's more, they don't want my upstream pipes to be congested by
bandwidth hogs.

Fine. I'd like to help you, because I'd like to have good service too. I think the same is probably true for most of your customers. This is best accomplished with a cooperative relationship between the users and the ISPs, not an adversary one. I've already given several examples of how this cooperation could substantially reduce the ISP resources that file sharing with Bit Torrent would consume.


Actually, some of our pipes ARE smaller upstream than downstream.
(These are the ones that feed our Web cache.) However, as I've
already mentioned, BitTorrent at least doubles the load, because it
requires you to transmit as much as you receive. And you can cache
FTP. You can't cache BitTorrent.

See above.


And are you aware of the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA?

Frankly, I don't care if I can manage to get off the hook. I don't have deep pockets. If I'm sued, I'm already screwed.

My advice, then, is to stay out of the ISP business. That is the only way you can be sure of not being sued.


No. Because you still will be attempting to hog and monopolize
bandwidth. That's still abusive behavior.

If you don't want me to "hog" and "monopolize" your bandwidth, then I suggest that you build your own personal dedicated network and not sell it to anyone. I'm reminded of the South Park episode in which Eric Cartman bought his own personal amusement park.


When you go into the network service business, your customers have the right to expect to use it. That's why they pay you. There certainly should be a good faith give-and-take to maximize the value of your network to your customers while minimizing your costs. Your customers should be aware that most of the resources they use are shared with each other, and that their behavior patterns may affect the performance of the network as seen by the other users. And it is perfectly reasonable for you to discard excess traffic from some users when it is necessary to give a minimum grade of service to other users.

But it is NOT reasonable for you to make, by fiat, value judgments about the relative importance of your customers' traffic based on their selection of protocols, or unsupported assumptions about the legality or illegality of their transactions. That is, quite frankly, outside your job description.

You *should* give your customers the hooks they need to mark their traffic according to the importance that *they* (not you) place on it, and you should use these hooks as advice when deciding what traffic to discard when it is necessary to maintain a minimum grade of service to other users.

In sum, I simply cannot understand how such a hostile, adversary situation has arisen given that there are many workable technical measures that can alleviate the situation to everyone's benefit. I am hoping that education and discussion can lead to a productive outcome.

--Phil