Cerf on BitTorrent

While in Australia, Vint Cerf (ICANN chairman, MCI technologist and a father of the Internet) says that Hollywood has been wispering sweet nothings about utilizing BitTorrent to distribute movies.

From CNET Australia:

"I know personally for a fact that various members of the movie industry are really getting interested in how to use the Internet--even BitTorrent--as a...method for distributing content.  I've spoken with several movie producers in the last month."

"(The entertainment industry) are only just now starting to come to honest grips with the possibilities of using the Internet."

And, I know that while working with TechNet we often get questions why the group is pushing greater broadband speeds to spur innovation.  Answer:  Australian pub "The Age" quotes Cerf saying:

"With BitTorrent and a gigabit internet connection - not yet here, but it will come - you could download an hour of digital TV in 15 seconds."

It's not hard to imagine what else you can do with that power.

And, one of the most amazing, but least mentioned Interenet factoids, Cerf said that:

BitTorrent now accounted for more than half of all traffic on the internet, more than double the volume of January 2004.

Comments

[Alejandra]

Vint: I believe you made a mtsaike in your explanation of "transmission rate caps", defining it as "a given minimum data rate" when I believe you meant to write a maximum data rate. From the user's perspective, I agree that a rate cap (AKA bandwidth limit) is easier to deal with than being charged by the byte (or megabyte). But, as Chris noted, that's exactly what most ISPs are doing today.You don't believe volume caps are the way to go and you evidently don't think rate caps are sufficient. So you suggest "prioritization should be applied across the board to all low latency traffic." Are you referring to the packet prioritization functionality in IPv4 and IPv6 or something similar?If packet prioritization was completely agnostic, applications would specify a packet's priority, not ISPs. But that assumes application developers will prioritize packets appropriately. There's nothing to stop one peer-to-peer software developer from designing their software to assign all of the packets their software sends as high-priority in hopes that their software will then perform faster than their competitors', giving them a competitive advantage. It's a tragedy of the commons' problem: since there's little to no cost to the individual for "cutting in line" by assigning their packets the highest priority, most application developers will assign their packets a high priority.Do you think ICANN should formulate guidelines for packet prioritization? If not ICANN, what about the Internet Society, IETF, or some other entity? Adam Thierer has asked this question over on .