Jerf, There are many truths to your point, and I do agree that the post as presented does come against some of those inherent problems with the ISPs. Becau

Jerf, There are many truths to your point, and I do agree that the post as presented does come against some of those inherent problems with the ISPs. Because I wanted to simplify the post, in an attempt to strip it to its bare minimum, I left out a very important aspect of the model - which changes the economics of the legal botnet a bit. Revenue share split with the ISPs. The bet is not on whether or not ISPs would do nothing in response to an inordinate amount of their network being used for P2P traffic. The real goal is to convert the 'bad' P2P traffic, but incentivizing the current P2Pers to use their machines for good use (and earn some money) while doing so. Again, of course, at the limits there might be some problems with the economics of it all - but I think rather than it blowing up, it is just unknown. No one knows exactly what will happen when the majority of the bad p2p traffic converts to good p2p traffic. I do agree that there are major quality issues, but I think we have reached the stage of technological advancement that those problems can be solved. Maybe not with something off the shelf, but definitely solved. As to your last point, the truth is that this idea actually has two business models and uses. I think I might do another post to flesh out that side, but the name of the post bares it out. A legal botnet. In other words, a legal way to fight fire against fire for DDOS attacks. The only way to defeat a DDOS (as far as I know) is to throw more bandwidth at the packets being sent. As it stands right now, it is very expensive to do that from one single ISP (or even a handful of ISPs). With a network like this, it would become an arms race. I would postulate that the legal side would win, because economics is on its side - for many of the larger targets anyway.