Is BitTorrent taking over the web?

[Hartamophone]

I heared an excellent interview of Terry McBride (CEO of Nettwerk Records) by Jian Ghomeshi yesterday on CBC. In a segment about the state of the industry, McBride claimed that 60% of the Internet's bandwidth is currently taken up by BitTorrent. Do you think this can be true? That's an awful lot of people downloading Dead shows and Simpsons episodes. If it is true, I'm sorry to say that I agree with those who are foreseeing a two-tiered Internet system.

Any thoughts?

Edited February 17, 2006 by Guest

[mattm]

my torrent client has been running for almost two months. Sometimes I turn it off when I have to take my laptop somewhere but mostly it's just downloading shit. I know lots of people that download a gig a day at least.

That's the bandwidth. If you look at what the internet is being used for I bet email and general browsing have higher percentages. It's the massive file sizes of the torrents (4 gig dvd's, 10 gig full seasons, shit like that) that uses all the bandwidth.

I'm not sure if anyone can actually measure that though. It's like surveys and polls. Notice around election time newspapers and shit will say one party is in the lead by xx% but if you read the fine print there's a good chance that only 3000 or so people actually got polled. There was an article in some newspaper I read a while ago that talked about this exact thing with the play on numbers.

The major companies want to slow down the torrent and such packets so it's easy to just jimmy up some numbers. Survey 10000 teens/college age kids that you know damn well are using torrents and you'll get a nice number like 80% which you can then publish. On the other hand, grab 10000 baby boomers and ask what they use the internet for. No longer is 60% of it being used for torrents.

The only way to check would be to put deep packet scanners on every ISP (hardcore invasion of privacy but it's already being done, I think Rogers put it in a while ago) and actually count the percentage of packets that are connected to a torrent. That would cost a lot.

Unfortunately torrents are for the most part illegal so it kills the good torrents from sites like etree

But there'll always be something on these lines. Before torrents you had the loads of p2p programs (imesh, kazaa, etc). The problem with these was that they were stupid and put ad/spyware in the programs. Before these there was Napster. Unfortunately for it, it was the first major p2p.

Newsgroups and IRC have always been the best way to get files but due to the complexity they aren't as well known. BBS's started it all.

What I'm getting at is that if they find a way to kill torrents, someone will figure out a way to make a file sharing application that looks like email, lets say, or something to bypass the scanners.

My two cents

What's the point of putting the Ç when censoring fuck? They pretty much look the same, granted it is rather funny though. I need to go to sleep.

[Booche]

60% of the Internet's bandwidth is currently taken up by BitTorrent. Do you think this can be true?

If they had of added "+5% Trey bashing +/-35% nonBTporn" ?

I would have believed it.

[Hartamophone]

Well said, mattm.

[Guest Low Roller]

Well if Rogers is castrating bandwidth for torrents, then it must be a problem of some sort.

[headygouda]

I've been averaging 20-40 gigs per month for the past 3 years and of that, likely more 70% of that is from torrenting.

[mattm]

It's not technically a problem, it's the same as everything else. Torrents are a major part of the internet and the ISP's have no way to cash in on it so they slow it down. TV got popular so they loaded it with advertisements, P2P got popular so they loaded it with advertisements. You can't advertise in torrents all that well other than including little shortcuts in the torrent which most people won't click on.

I also forgot all about porn. I bet if someone really was able to verify and produce proper statistics, porn would be the number one use of the internet. I was watching Bravo the other night and they had a show about internet porn but it was focused on portable porn. Video iPods, iPod porn. They were saying that because of the internet and the slow withdrawl of hardcore belief in religion (westerners), it's much more acceptible. They found that the Suicide Girls sold tonnes (tonnes) more videos than the iPod site. Here's a little article that talks about it. I think it's odd and neat at the same time. Portable porn, hehe.

The best thing is to make sure you have at least one computer geek in your group of friends so you can stay on top of the latest shit like this.

Just remember: If you like it, buy it.

[Blane]

I just checked my Azureus statistics and have put 460gb of traffic on it since I installed it less than a year ago (probably more like 8 months).

[canadianphan]

Here's an AP article from Nov. 04 stating that Bit Torrent accounts for 35% of web traffic (note that this is almost a year and a half old)

This Slyck story talks about web traffic on campus being made up of 70% “undesirable†content. They then go on to talk about bit-shaping and the rise of encrypted BT clients (like uTorrent 1.4.1 which I run). You can find furthur discussion about Rogers and BT Encryption here.

BT is also going legit. There has been allot of discussion about UK cable giant NTL who has announced that it is going to be trialling a new service which will allow users to download films using the BitTorrent protocol. Linux and Open Office have been using BT to distribute their software for years.

I agree with MATTM; P2P technology has always been a part of the internet, and despite the fact that people have always been trying to make a buck from the internet, the community of people willing to share content in exchange for more content is not going anywhere. It’s a paradox, as the world wide web becomes bigger the parts that make it up are becoming smaller. We are moving to a system where content isn’t generated by Yahoo and Amazon, but by individuals with their blogs and networked content archives.

P2P is the enemy of Corporate America, it allows individuals to share instead of buy. From Carl Sagan: Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together--surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing.

Information is power, and it belongs to the citizens.

[Esau]

I just checked my Azureus statistics and have put 460gb of traffic on it since I installed it less than a year ago (probably more like 8 months).

LOL, thats funny cuz I checked mine and its just over 200 right now. I installed it last june. Before that, I couldn't caculate the amount, I average around 5-8 shows a week now with my throttled connection (peaking at 20kbs dn/ 5 up) before that, I was hitting up to 35-50GB (uploads) a month for awhile (over a year I'm told), supposedly thats what drew their attention, my massive amount of uploads from torrenting.

[Blane]

who is your provider Esau? The vast majority of that bandwidth is upload and I've still got an 80kb/s limit from Bell. Never heard any complaints from them.

[Esau]

Source Cable (Quick Clic) is my provider.

http://www.sourcecable.ca/internet/hispeed.html

I'm in really strange situation actually, I'm part of a small portion of the Hamilton escarpment that falls into Source Cable's jurisdiction. Because of this my only other option for internet is Bell dial-up.

I've tried numerous port ranges, with & without firewall/router etc with no success. Pisses me off to, because I'll do a speed test at and will get on average 4.5-5.3 Mb down & 400-480 kbps Up on my connection, should be pulling great speeds with bittorrent, in my opinion.

6MB/512kbps is what I pay for. :mad:

[mattm]

A little talk with Jim Carrol who brings up a very good point:

Carrol warns the cable companies not to make the same mistake as the music industry did by “going to war†with it’s (geeky) customers.

In his talk he advised cable engineers to embrace new technologies like file-sharing and Ip-tv and Voip instead of fighting new technologies like the music industry did with MP3’s.

“Do you really want to go to war with your customers?†he asked. “The music industry went to war with its customers and look where it got them. Do you want to repeat that history? [color:red]The geeks will always win because they can always rewrite the codeâ€