Comments on: Inventor of the Internet takes aim at BitTorrent

Lawrence Roberts invented packet networking. Now he's is trying to fix one of its biggest problems: network overload caused by peer-to-peer file transfers.

[bmeacham]

I'm real tired of snide comments about Al Gore. Gore never claimed to invent the internet. He claimed, quite correctly, that he drove the legislative climate that allowed the internet to grow and flourish.

[rdnetto]

Just cause this guy 'invented the internet', doesn't mean he understands it. It is physically impossible for any user to use more bandwidth than they have been allocated; the reason that users may receive less than that is because the ISP allocates more bandwidth than it has.
Audio and video use up far more bandwidth than anything else, so if you're going to throttle BT to cope with this, the same logic says that you also should throttle VOIP and YouTube! This can put things in perspective for the average user, who thinks all P2P is evil. BT is actually the most efficient protocol for delivering data to multiple users, far more efficient than the standard client-server model. The latest version of BT allows websites to host content as torrents so that more simulataneous downloaders result in higher speeds instead of lower ones. 80% of the traffic is currently P2P - if the data were distributed in the conventional fashion, that would likely tripple or more - that's how efficient BT is for content distribution.
Furthermore, not everything transferred on P2P is illegal - BT is the #1 source for linux distros (which are free), and a great source of Creative Commons (free) and public domain (also free) works, not to mention content that is being made *freely* available, such as the documentary Steal This Movie or promotional pieces released by some of the more forward-thinking artists.
Throttling P2P traffic is going to seriously harm innovation, and will hinder one of the most promising technologies around.