My first reaction was "yikes, that's super unethical to use users' bandwidth, storage, and processing power without their knowledge". But after thinking about i

My first reaction was "yikes, that's super unethical to use users' bandwidth, storage, and processing power without their knowledge". But after thinking about it a lot, I have to say I've come around. As users, we all pay for upload bandwidth, and 99% of the time it's sitting there idly and providing literally no value to us or anyone else. That's because gosh darn it, we paid for it, so there's no way we're gonna let anyone else us it! But, if we stop thinking in binary terms of "my property" or "your property", and open our minds for a minute, what's so bad, really, about each of us donating a few resources to make the shared Internet run faster for everyone? If everyone does the same, we're all better off, and no one is worse off since the bandwidth was just going to waste anyway. Furthermore, the storage needed is already in use, storing the exact same content, just for your own exclusive use instead of everyone's, and the additional CPU cycles needed are surely much fewer than it takes to run the worthless ads your browser downloads everyday. I think of it as sort of the same logic as vaccination, where we ask people to pay a small private cost in a way that produces outsized benefits for society as a whole. In particular, each person gets an individual benefit much larger than the cost of the private resources they paid. Now, if the private resources aren't practically free like bandwidth or ROM, but actually expensive like capped data or mobile phone battery life, the ethical logic starts to get a bit murkier. However, I think it's definitely possible to build an effective peer-to-peer CDN without needing to touch those kind of scarce resources. The other reservation I have about this sort of project is that you really need to be able to trust the people running it to not abuse their control of the network (which really just means: other peoples' computers). That's, in my view, a much thornier issue than anything relating to the consumer end of the network. Let's hope the team will be able to successfully tackle both the technical and the human problems of a P2P CDN, and help push the Internet towards a more communal, sharing paradigm. Best of luck to them.