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Spotify cleaned up a lot in 2014. They used to be peer-to-peer, and they'd give "free" service to employees of certain big tech companies because they could ta

• thomastjeffery 9y ago
  It's sad to see that peer to peer is not utilized more, since it scales so well. The overbearing copyright propaganda has given BitTorrent a bad name, even though it has so many other uses.
  • cortesoft 9y ago
    It scales really well for the owner of the service... it does not scale really well for the internet as a whole (sadly).
    • thomastjeffery 9y ago
      How so? There only issue I can think of is upload speed, which is improving for many, and would improve more prevalently if more average users had a clear need.
      • schoen 9y ago
        The original BitTorrent wasn't aware of network topology at all, so it could randomly use a relatively expensive or congested link just as easily as a LAN connection. You could get better use of network resources overall if you usually preferred to get pieces from peers that are closer to you on the network. I think the BitTorrent company and/or community were studying this issue at some point and so they may have come up with alternative algorithms that prefer at least AS-locality or something. As an extreme case, imagine that there are two seeds, one being another computer on your LAN and another being a host in Timor-Leste (which at one point in the 2000s reportedly had a single T1 connection for the entire country). It will be nicer for you and for the Timorese if you can somehow arrange to simply download the file from your LAN seed. Here's one example of someone trying to improve this property: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopBT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopBT
        • thomastjeffery 9y ago
          I would argue that in the long run, it is better to demand more bandwidth than is available, so that infrastructure builders can react accordingly.
          • schoen 9y ago
            I like the overprovisioning concept fine, but it's going to be pretty expensive to overprovision for the possibility of high-speed connections between all random pairs of hosts everywhere in the world regardless of geography. We'll probably have to persuade a lot more people to value this degree of connectivity ideologically, because demand for it isn't really getting expressed much right now. I don't want to sound like a Bellhead here, but the packet switching infrastructure that's been built out has embodied some assumptions about its likely patterns of use. To change those patterns of use a lot (which I'd like to see too) probably needs more infrastructure. Even things like ADSL are a problem here. I agree that path asymmetry doesn't feel at all healthy for the Internet -- it feels like it's baking in producer and consumer roles -- but there are a few counterarguments that may give us some pause: * It's never been cheaper for people who specifically want to provide services to others to rent servers in colocation facilities. It's getting cheaper every year. So, maybe people who care to do so could just rent some servers. (Of course, this might give them less autonomy because there are more people who can decide to kick them off or shut them down, and they might still not have the infrastructure to distribute media that they produce at home to the servers they rent. On the other hand, running things at home may make anonymous publishing harder because the associated broadband service is usually tied to a physical address by the ISP.) * There's never been a huge amount of expressed demand for symmetric network connections, even when they've been available as an option. (Maybe this is different in different countries?) The economic division of network operators into "eyeball networks" (major net traffic sinks) and "provider networks" (major net traffic sources) seems to be getting sharper over time. The network operators themselves might have an economic incentive to try to get their users to equalize the traffic in both directions -- especially in terms of arrangements around settlement-free peering -- but they haven't managed to change most users' habits very much this way. * I think of myself as a very pro-decentralization Internet user, yet whenever I run "ifconfig wlan0 | grep bytes", my download volumes consistently dramatically outpace my upload volumes, even though I have a symmetric broadband connection both at home and at work! So apparently I'm not being the change I want to see in the world.
      • always_good 9y ago
        Well, doesn't your answer of "it's improving for many" admit to the reality that it sucks right now, answering your own question? Besides, even if we have more bandwidth, it doesn't change the fact that p2p would require more of it. Also, if you asked the average person if they want Spotify to be peer-to-peer + use more bandwidth vs centralized + use less bandwidth, do you think they are in a position to care much beyond the bandwidth difference? Especially on mobile devices? I certainly would choose the latter. What do I care about making Spotify's operations cheaper at my own expense?
        • thomastjeffery 9y ago
          > it doesn't change the fact that p2p would require more of it. But P2P doesn't require more bandwidth. It requires more upload bandwidth, which is arbitrarily constrained. > if you asked the average person if they want Spotify to be peer-to-peer + use more bandwidth vs centralized + use less bandwidth, do you think they are in a position to care much beyond the bandwidth difference? Especially on mobile devices? Of course not. Spotify is already tailored to the current state of internet infrastructure, which heavily favors centralized content delivery. Spotify can afford to foot the bill for their content delivery network. That is why it is no longer "better" for them to use peer to peer networking. > What do I care about making Spotify's operations cheaper at my own expense? For Spotify or Netflix, or any other site that already has a centralized CDN, there is no advantage. For everything else, however, P2P is a great way to scale distribution, and the more we do to incentivize ISPs to increase upload speed, open ports, etc. the better.
      • cortesoft 9y ago
        Well, ISPs did not build their systems with equal upload and download in mind. There is no pure technical reason they couldn't have, but it was what they did. To replace all of that would be difficult, and the large players in the existing system will have economic motivations for fighting any change. There is a pretty good write up here: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2009/10/03/why-up-is-slower-than-down/ http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2009/10/03/why-up-is-slower-...
        • thomastjeffery 9y ago
          > To replace all of that would be difficult Not particularly. Symmetry is totally arbitrary. It's having the same amount down as before, while having more up that is the problem. > and the large players in the existing system -will- have economic motivations for fighting any change. That's the real problem. The solution is to give them an economic incentive to change. Average users wanting more bandwidth/symmetry is an effective way to do that.
          • toast0 9y ago
            Symmetry isn't totally arbitrary. In many deployed access technologies, scaling head end send speed is easier than scaling user end send speed; sometimes there are settings to increase upload speed at the expense of download speed (ex annex M for adsl2), but sometimes it's an inherently asymmetric system.
            • thomastjeffery 9y ago
              Even so, it would be a good thing for ISPs to change that infrastructure. That won't happen until there is a fiscal incentive for them to do so, so let's not be afraid to give them one.
      • kodablah 9y ago
        It usually requires more copies and more uploaders due to the fact that personal devices' uptimes are much more ephemeral.
    • lrem 9y ago
      No. As someone whose PhD touched this: it is actually ok because it stabilises towards using the most available paths. As someone who set this up at an ISP: you can QoS the hell out of P2P and keep everyone happy. That's unless you tried blocking it and now find yourself in a stupid arms war, against folks with more free time than yourself.
  • lathiat 9y ago
    I get the feeling that a lot of p2p efforts fail because of patents. For example I understand the reason Facetime calls don't go phone-to-phone and instead go through a server is because of a patent [troll]. I'm curious to see how WebRTC fits into that.
    • seanalltogether 9y ago
      I think that was more a lesson from observing the problems with Skype and other video conferencing software. P2P video is great when everything is one on one, start adding in additional people and the whole experience grinds to a stuttering pixelated mess.
      • thomastjeffery 9y ago
        That's for small scale real-time. P2P scales great at a slightly larger scale, especially with larger chunks of data.
  • user5994461 9y ago
    It doesn't scale well. It saturates the upload bandwidth and grinds the connection to a halt. It ruins the internet for the entire family or office. Office sysadmins will block the software and start a witch hunt once they realize the problem. Also, connecting doesn't work with NAT, carrier grade NAT and firewalls. They need a client-server model with a server that is accessible.
    • thomastjeffery 9y ago
      > It doesn't scale well in every circumstance. Just because ISPs love to skimp on upload speed does not mean that it is reasonable to do so. Infrastructure is reactionary. If users need more upload speed, they will pay for it, and ISPs will update the infrastructure accordingly. > Also, connecting doesn't work with NAT, carrier grade NAT and firewalls. They need a client-server model with a server that is accessible. That's another arbitrary issue caused by overbearing ISPs. There is an awful lot that people would be able to do if they had reasonable control over their ports. ISPs - especially the 6 massive incumbents - build the absolute minimum infrastructure they can get away with. That is simply their fiscal incentive. We shouldn't be afraid to give them new incentives.
  • dmitriid 9y ago
    p2p does not work on mobile. That is, it work, but it drains data plans. That’s the only reason companies give up on p2p.