I read Mark Cuban's blog because I usually agree with him or wholeheartedly disagree-- he's the type of person who definitely puts his opinions out there, for better or worse. Today he wants Comcast to block P2P users. Today's a day where I disagree with Mr. Cuban.
As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders. Thats right, P2P content distributors are nothing more than freeloaders. The only person/organization that benefits from P2P usage are those that are trying to distribute content and want to distribute it on someone else's bandwidth dime.
"Distribute it on someone else's bandwidth dime"? This is bandwidth that the consumer has purchased. If they feel like they want to use the connection that they have to their home for other purposes, they should be able to do so. If we start putting control of the internet in the hands of big media companies like Comcast the internet is going to go down the shitter quick.
Cuban's main argument is that we should charge P2P users out the wazoo so that those who don't use P2P services aren't impacted as much. So basically, it's a question of speed. That, in my view, lies distinctly in the hands of the telcos and other service providers, not consumers. After all, we've already paid our $200 billion for broadband speed we never got. If we had the speeds that we were promised in America, the guy down the street sharing his copy of Free Culture would hardly dent Cuban's access. With our current abysmal access in America, the perceived difference in speeds are noticeable.
Furthermore, it's just a bit scary to contemplate a marketplace where we limit people's access to the internet based on the ideas coming from the boardroom of multibillion dollar corporations staffed by old people who still might not understand what an internet is at this point. Cuban clearly doesn't mind, as HDNet now qualifies him in the big media market:
After all, that is why P2P is used, right ? For content distributors to avoid significant bandwidth and hosting charges. That makes it commercial traffic far more often than not. So make them pay commercial rates.
Cuban's company or other large media companies would be able to afford those costs, but someone like a Revision3 might not. While they do use CacheFly for a lot of distribution, I'd imagine they rely upon plenty of Bittorrent traffic to improve their margins. If you take that away, you lose these indie video networks. With near-HD quality podcasts and video networks starting to gain prevalence, you're pushing around 700MB or more files around. It's not cheap. If you can rely upon your users to help you absorb some of that cost voluntarily, that's only going to be beneficial and true to the roots of the internet itself.