Mark Cuban's blog

I'm not a Comcast customer. I happen to get service from Verizon, ATT and Time Warner at various locations where I pay for internet service.

If I was a Comcast customer, I would tell them, as I am now telling all the services I am a customer of:

BLOCK P2P TRAFFIC , PLEASE

As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders. Thats right, P2P content distributors are nothing more than freeloaders. The only person/organization that benefits from P2P usage are those that are trying to distribute content and want to distribute it on someone else's bandwidth dime.

Does anyone really think its free ? That all the bandwidth consumed with content being distributed by P2P isn't being paid for by someone ? That bandwidth is being paid for by consumers. Consumers who pay for personal, not commercial applications. When consumers provide their bandwidth to assist commercial applications, they are subsidizing those commercial applications which if it isn't already, should be against an ISPs terms of service.

Thats not to say there isnt a place for P2P. There is. P2P is probably the least efficient means of distributing content in the last mile. Comcast, Time Warner, etc should charge a premium to those users who want to act as a seed and relay for P2P traffic. After all, that is why P2P is used, right ? For content distributors to avoid significant bandwidth and hosting charges. That makes it commercial traffic far more often than not. So make them pay commercial rates.

That will stop P2P dead in its tracks. P2P isnt so good that people will use it when they have to pay for all the bandwidth it consumes. It will die a quick death. That will speed up my internet connection.

thats a good thing.

So hang in there Comcast

m

One thing continues to be a certainty in the technology world, NEVER challenge a sacred cow. If you do, the punches start flying. Of course the punches have to fly because the there isn't a real response otherwise.

I'm obviously not a huge P2P fan. Gordon Haff did a far better job than I explaining some reasons why. I think there. are valid applications for P2P on private networks, but nothing on the Internet that I think is worth surviving.

My position has nothing to do with Piracy. I think the MPAA and RIAA efforts towards piracy are a joke. They spend more money and waste more government resources than should be allowed. If they spent that money and time promoting why people should go to the movies and the value of owning music, those industries would benefit far more than anything they lose to piracy.

My position is not "if it uses bandwidth, its a bad thing". Flickr, Google Video, any host that pays for their bandwidth is all right by me. If they want to give it away, go for it. I actually think Google Video is a far better solution for audio and video distribution than any P2P solution. Google is willing to subsidize the worlds bandwidth for multimedia, why doesn't everyone take them up on their offer ? Go for it Google.

My position is not related to the Internet backbone. There is plenty of bandwidth there and will be for the short and as long a term as I can envision.

My position is related to the last mile. P2P is so incredibly inefficient. You send and receive the same bytes , which means for the portion of the file you are a seed for, you are at least 50pct inefficient. The more often you supply the bytes on your PC to others, the more you impose on the network. If there is a failure somewhere in the chain of delivery and assembly on the destination device , the error recovery process makes things far less efficient. All consuming more and more last mile bandwidth. The bandwidth that defines how fast my internet connection is.

I think the position that "you pay for the bandwidth, so you can use it any way you want" isn't reality and very flawed when it comes to P2P.

P2P "works" because those who install the clients are wiling to barter some of their bandwidth in exchange for getting a file that represents something of value to them. The bandwidth obviously has significant value to the person or company asking you to contribute it. That's why torrent clients and almost every P2P client requires you to contribute bandwidth in order to receive the goodies you want.

Bottom line, you are re-selling bandwidth. For those of you who like the buffet analogy, that's like saying you paid for the buffet, so its OK to take as much jello and mac and cheese as you can carry and walk outside the restaurant and sell it or trade it. Bizarre example, but it makes the point. Just because something is not metered and seemingly not suffering from any level of scarcity doesn't mean it isn't limited in availability and costly.

Because if it wasn't costly, we all would already have 1gbs to our home via fiber or free wireless everywhere.

The reality of our bandwidth to the home scenario today is that there isn't enough bandwidth to cure all ills. Last Mile Bandwidth is constrained and expensive to grow in multiples of what we all are ready and happily able to consume with legit applications

I personally don't want to see my connections slow down so P2P users can resell bandwidth to someone who isn't willing to pay for bandwidth in order to distribute their bandwidth consuming files.

but hey, that's me.

"All publicity is good publicity" It may have been true at some point, but it certainly is not true today. Nor will it be true forever more.

Instead, the motto has changed to "All Publicity is Abused Publicity"

The reality is that in todays ultra competitive chase to get your attention , if something you say or do is seen by more than 100 people, someone is going to attempt to re-purpose it to their own benefit or amusement.

In essence, the internet has put us all under a form of digital arrest.

"Everything we say or do, can and will be used for or against you on a website somewhere at some time, from now and ever-more"

There will be someone there with a camera phone to memorialize the mustard that dripped on your shirt from your hotdog and some website will use it to explain how the stress of "fill in the blank" is getting to you.

Someone will keep a picture from your 5th birthday party when your sister dressed you up as a Spice Girl. Your local newspaper will write an article saying how cute it was. Then some website or tv show, produced by someone who doesn't like you, will use it to try to convince their readers that you are gender confused and here is proof that it started at an early age.

Silly examples for sure, but real.

The one thing the internet lacks that will forever change us all is Context.

There is no way to retain context when you cut and paste. No matter the original intent of the words or pictures, anything on the net probably will find its way into situations for which they were never intended.

Publicity, in fact all information used to have a shelf life. Newspapers were relegated to the hassles of microfiche. TV became a box or tape on a shelf somewhere. You could find it, but the cost in dollars and time were significant. Which of course reduced its use.

Thats no longer the case. Between the internet archives and search engines Everything is Everywhere. Forever.

The Net is a beautiful, wonderful utility but it certainly not an innocent medium.

I obviously hit a nerve with my last post. My index for quality of post has evolved to the number of "you suck", "broadcast.com sucks", "You got lucky", etc posts that are submitted but never confirmed. For this post it was off the charts. Good.

When people resort to personal comments. Its usually a good sign.

Among those I respect, there were a lot of great responses. Let me first say, my position on this has nothing to do with HDNet. I've not abandoned the net. In fact i have more than 100 RSS feeds and untold other sites Im involved with.

I've been inundated with spam on Myspace. Used flicker. Used Digg for sourcing news and laughed at the unending ridiculousness of its posters. Used and posted to Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Veoh, Flickr, Slideshare, used every bittorrent client, got bored with twitter after 7 minutes, signed up for other findme, find you, this is where I am, this is where you are, type app I could find, and the lists go on and on. I read techmeme, techcrunch, extremetech, and tons of other tech sites and I make a point to try every and any new site that seems the least bit plausible or interesting. I spend far far too much time on the net just to make sure I keep up and know whats going on.

Honestly, its just a bigger, more time consuming version on CompuServe Forums from back in the day (Find someone who participated in the OS/2 forums if you want to know about social networks). Only back then you didn't call People friends, they were just forum members.

I have a ton of Internet investments that you dont and wont know about.

I have loaded and used facebook apps and I have downloaded the API documentation and actually read it. I'm such an exciting guy, I downloaded Ruby on Rails and read the documentation as well. That's what Saturday Nights are for.

I have bought installed and integrated every imaginable wireless device in my house. I think its fun.

I have invested in and gotten involved with application development on Facebook. Had a serious discussion with Facebook about the revenue opportunities they could achieve if they would license their API for full scale commercial applications on other websites. For example, to me, it would be an interesting and potentially explosive business move for Yahoo to license the Facebook API for their Panama platform. I think the beauty of Facebook is that people for the first time have defined and opened up the "database of their lives". Which if integrated into an advertising platform like Panama would allow advertisers to truly personalize ads, rather than algorithmically present ads. To me it was an interesting conversation.

I think it could change the way advertising is handled on the net. Each user could have the option to publish certain fields/objects which could be replicated/peered to the licensees of the API and then integrated Into the ad serving application. When the user showed up on the licensee site, say Yahoo Finance, the ad server could present a contextual ad chosen based on the published objects within the context of the Yahoo content.

Its one of many good or bad ideas that are feasible because the net is the plain vanilla boring, never really changing platform that it is.

Guess what. When things go from exciting to stable and boring in the technology world, that's a good thing.

Call me a cynic. I feel the same way about Personal Computers. Faster processors dint do it for me. Installing Vista was a disaster till I read a copy of CPU magazine and used the OS mods they had in there to clean the junk up. Its sad but true that a 25 year old platform is more volatile than the Internet. It still takes so long to boot that for the first time since I had a Mac in 1990 I bought a Macbook and junked my Vista Laptop. My time is at a premium. The days of being concerned that if I bought a Mac there might be some apps that I could use but the wouldn't run on the Mac are long gone. Not because the Mac has an Intel processor, but because I cant really think of any new off the shelf software that I would get excited to buy.

Beyond Office and email, I spend a ton of time on the net. That boring platform that ain't gonna change and is dead in the excitement category.

What do I get excited about ?

I'm excited about Virtual Machines, as I have written before, and the changes and impact they could have on all of us. I get fired up about the continuing decline in flash and hard drive prices. Its amazing to me after all these years of watching drive prices fall that I can buy more than 500gigs of drive for under 100 bucks. That I can buy a 16gig flash drive for not much more. and it still pisses me off that i have to deal with file size limits that require me to manage my email files when I back them up.

And of course I'm excited about the HDTV space and whats happening there.

Maybe some people dont think peoples media consumption patterns change when 70" HDTVs are installed in their homes, I do.

Which brings me to why I said that "The Net is Dead and Boring"

The best way to sum up how I feel about the excitement and opportunities on the net compared to the many other personal and corporate technology options out there is to use a Yogi Berra quote.

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded"

When everyone is looking for gold in the same river, the best opportunities are somewhere else.

But hey, that's just me.

A lot of people are all up and upset about my comments that the Internet is dead and boring. Well guess what, it is. Every new technological, mechanical or intellectual breakthrough has its day, days, months and years. But they don't rule forever. That's the reality.

Every generation has its defining breakthrough. Cars, TV, Radio, Planes,highways, the wheel, the printing press, the list goes on forever. I'm sure in each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions "dead and boring". The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted.

Some of you may not want to admit it, but that's exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.

That's not to say the impact of the Internet on the entire planet hasn't been off the charts. It has been. It has changed the lives of billions of people and it will continue to be a utility to billions of people. Just like cars, TVs, Radio, Planes, Highways, you get the point.

Some people have tried to make the point that Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet is evolving. Actually it is the exact opposite. Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet has stopped evolving and stabilized as a platform. Its very very difficult to develop applications on a platform that is ever changing. Things stop working in that environment. Internet 1.0 wasn't the most stable development environment. To days Internet is stable specifically because its now boring.(easy to avoid browser and script differences excluded)

Applications like Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, etc were able to explode in popularity because they worked. No one had to worry about their ISP making a change and things not working. The days of walled gardens like AOL, Prodigy and others were gone. The days of always on connections were not only upon us, but in sufficient numbers at home, work and school, that the applications ran fast enough to hold our interest and compel us to participate. In other words, the Internet stabilized. Great software was developed to run on the software.

Just as a reminder to some, Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, etc are not "the Internet". They are software applications that run on the Internet. Just like MicroSoft Excel is a software application that runs on MicroSoft and Apple operating systems.

The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead. They are dead until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers than the vast majority of broadband users get today.

Few people's actual throughput to their homes have increased more than 5mbs in the past 5 years, and few people's throughput (if you dint understand the difference between throughput and the marketed downstream speeds your read from your ISP, you should) to their homes will increase more than 10mbs in the next 5 years. That's not enough to define a platform that allows really smart people to come up with groundbreaking ideas.

In fact, if you index the expected growth in bandwidth consumption by applications that are heavy LAST MILE bandwidth users (as opposed to the Internet backbone where there is plenty of bandwidth but consumers cant get to it) vs the actual increase in LAST MILE bandwidth available to the home, our net effective throughput to the home could decline over the next few years. The Internet is like a highway. There is plenty of room for everyone to go as fast as the throughput will let you go, that is until the traffic forces everyone to slow down.

For some reason a lot of people don't understand that concept.

So, let me repeat, The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead for the foreseeable future..

The Internet is boring. That is not a bad thing. In fact its easy to make the argument that its a great thing. That it has become the utility that the people who worked to get it started firmly believed it would. That it finally is the platform for any number of mundane applications that are easy to write and that anyone can use and trust.

Just like wheels, printing presses, cars, TV, radio, electricity, water.....

For some reason the fact that intranets can significantly outperform Internets and in particular THE Internet is a shocking concept. It shouldn't be. An intranet is a contained network managed to optimize the performance to meet the needs of the participants on the network. Your corporate network in your local office is an intranet. You probably have IT people working hard to make sure its up and as fast as they can make it. Your home network is an intranet. Wired or wireless, you are probably able to get throughput that far exceeds the speed you get from your Internet connection. The INTERNET on the other hand is owned by no one, optimized for no one. Whoever you buy your Internet connectivity from, particularly if you are a broadband customer, has a network that is physically, locally accessible through a persistent connection (as opposed to dialing in to a remote network). They do everything they possibly can to make it as fast as possible. Your speed and throughput is dependent on a variety of variables, the most important of which is the type of wire/fiber that connects your house to the network. Their ability to control the quality of service and throughput you receive to your home disappears the minute your traffic leaves their network and is passed of ff on to the route that will take or request your bits to or from their destination. Think of it as crossing the border between the USA and Mexico in a car. . Neither side cares about how fast the traffic of the other side gets through. If its busy, its busy. If its slow, its slow. Its not their primary concern. This is exactly why your video buffers , websites timeout and downloads take forever. No one is responsible for making sure its fast.

That's what invitation from C. R. Sanderson said. Its also the invitation I had been waiting on for a long time.

Why ? Because it came from StoresOnline. StoresOnline is a public company that i have been short in the past, but currently don't have a position in. I was short the stock of this company because I always believed that it was a company that specialized in ripping off people who didn't know any better with claims of grabbing their "Share of the Billions in Revenue on the Internet"

I wasn't the only one to question their business model. There are a long list of people who are questioning Storesonline and how they treat consumers.

The biggest hurdle that StoresOnline faces, IMHO however, is the battle they have with the state of Utah over whether or not they are a "business opportunity".

Storesonline claims they only sell software. Now personally, i have never received an email from a legit ecommerce software company making the above claim. I haven't read anywhere else but in my StoresOnline invitation how I can " learn how half a million people generate income using the Internet !". Nowhere else do software vendors claim that "Your opportunities to make money are virtually limitless !"

Does that sound like a business opportunity pitch to you ?

Read the rest of this post at Mark Cuban's BLog Maverick.