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[ NNSquad ] Re: NY Times: Verizon offers system to improve P2P transfers 

Verizon does continue to set itself apart.

The statement:

"Pasko stressed, however, that Verizon wants to work with P2P companies that are focusing on delivery of legitimate media, like Pando -- not systems where anyone can upload anything, which usually means lots of pirated material."

does strike me as having the potential to run into neutrality concerns when the carriers begin picking winners and losers in the P2P technology competition. As we all know, Bittorrent is open-source (and as a company, focused on legitimate media) while other solutions are either closed source or subject to content controls, patents and other nonsense. I'd hate to see the carriers giving competitive advantage to one but not the other just based upon their ownership of the gateway.

As with most things, Verizon management should take note that open apis/public specifications would enable P2P software authors to take advantage of any locational data Verizon wants to publish about it's customers in a neutral fashion -- that said, most torrent clients will pick faster peers and as such will naturally tend to favor closer networks already. So ... while there is probably room for some optimization in transfers with a very large list of potential peers, more common transfers with only a few dozen peers would likely see no benefit as their clients are already capable of finding the fastest peers with which to participate.

Anyway, certainly is a razors edge they're walking,

Kevin McArthur


Frank A. Coluccio wrote: 
Verizon continues to stand out from the pack in a growing number of new and
interesting ways. Whether this reaching out to P2P users is legit, or involves
hidden gotchas, remains to be seen. Although, if the abundance of bandwidth
afforded by its FiOS offering is any indication of its philosophical bent,
then I'd be inclined to think that it's for real, especially when one
considers the efficiencies that Verizon itself stands to gain from this
approach. The one potential cause for citing a gotcha that I can see, thus far
-- and I've not looked at this in any depth, but this could play out to be
large-- might involve how Verizon goes about influencing Layer 3 routing,
since, in this case, we see a last mile network operator is having a say,
albeit in collaboration with a P2P vendor, in where traffic is, and is not,
being directed to and from. Thoughts on this or any other facet of this
release? Anyone?

--- lauren@vortex.com wrote:

From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: nnsquad@nnsquad.org
Cc: lauren@vortex.com
Subject: [ NNSquad ] NY Times: Verizon offers system to improve P2P transfers
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:14:25 -0700 (PDT)


NY Times: Verizon offers system to improve P2P transfers

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-P2P-Verizon.html

--Lauren--
NNSquad Moderator