Yahoo News profiles Time-Warner and its new monthly broadband internet bandwidth caps for all but its most expensive residential service plan.
St. Louis-based and about to be bankrupt Charter Communications has already done the same.
And it’s going to be monkey see, monkey do.
What’s going on here?
Answer: Microsoft, Adobe, RIAA, MPAA.
Monthly bandwidth caps for most people seriously cripples BitTorrent traffic, and therefore the ability of many people to pirate software, music and movies. While there are many legal and legitimate uses for BitTorrent, most BT traffic is pirated stuff. BT works by your downloading disparate portions of a download from other people that have already downloaded it, and others download from you parts that you have already downloaded. If a “piece” of a 4 GB download is 1 MB, then your download will have 4,000 “pieces.” You could be in the process of downloading piece #3285 from somebody, and at the same time someone else is downloading piece #1014 from you, which you had downloaded long ago. In fact, you don’t get all 4,000 pieces sequentially, you get them as they’re available, and are done downloading when you have all 4,000, all the while someone else is getting from you the pieces you already have once you have them. For a popular and well-seeded torrent, you could have dozens of people from whom you are downloading and in turn dozens to whom you are uploading. Since most people’s internet connections are asynchronous, i.e. the download speed is far faster than the upload speed, in order to prevent a residential connection from being used as a server, you’ll download a well-seeded torrent far faster than you’ll upload it. A courteous user of torrents has to have a 2-to-1 ratio of uploading to downloading, i.e. allow others to upload twice as much from you as you have downloaded from others. They must keep their BitTorrent client open well after they have finished downloading the thing of interest. Otherwise, torrents disappear.
Torrents are the preferred way to spread pirated software, movies and music because there is no central server that can be sued. If you hosted a site where you could directly download such files, your ISP would shut you down, otherwise the RIAA/MPAA/BSA would sue both you and the ISP. Torrents, on the other hand, are merely bunch of anonymous people exchanging pieces with each other. Napster, in its original incarnation, sorta worked this way, but there was a central server where one could search for music files, download the special P2P application, and you downloaded the entire MP3 file from one person in particular, and only after it was finished, only one person at a time could download that file from you.
Here is why TW and Charter b/w caps puts a monkey wrench in BT.
Let’s say there’s a 4 GB package you want to download/bootleg. It could be a DVD movie, or a large software package, maybe an operating system, maybe a productivity suite. (It might even be a legal download, such as Fedora or OpenSUSE distributions of Linux.) If you download the whole thing from BT, you’ve used up 4 GB of your own bandwidth. But if you allow others to upload twice that much from you, that’s 8 GB of uploading bandwidth, meaning that for that one package, you’ve used up 12 GB of bandwidth. That exceeds your monthly bandwidth allotment for some Time-Warner plans, and takes up a big percentage of it for higher-priced plans. If you go over your limit, you’re going to be billed a buck per gig. Charter has a 100 GB monthly cap, but I don’t know if they let you go over your cap and then charge you for the overage. Still, you can see that you can do very few (if only one) BitTorrent package in a month. If most people have b/w caps, then there will be far fewer seeders for various and coveted bootleg versions of software, music and movies.
Because of the network effect, Microsoft and Adobe might not really be behind this, because ending piracy only switches individual end-users and the third world to open source. But there is no network effect for music and movies, piracy and bootlegging do not benefit the record labels and movie studios at all. The RIAA and MPAA would entirely benefit from this. I tend to think that the RIAA and MPAA will get a percentage cut of the cost of service plans that have unlimited bandwidth, and a percent of the monthly overage fees people pay, based on the presumption that that bandwidth is being used to bootleg movies and music.
At this time, I am not aware of any DSL providers capping b/w. It is only TW and Charter cable modem providers. There is a reason why cable modem providers might have an incentive to limit b/w while DSL providers do not (for now). Cable modem providers are also cable carriers, and therefore they have to deal directly with the media conglomerates that own cable stations, and some of those conglomerates are also movie studios and record labels. (Heck, Time-Warner IS a movie studio and a record label.) Time-Warner and Charter capping bandwidth in order to monkeywrench BitTorrent might be a consideration they’re giving in exchange for lower per-subscriber rates the cable company has to pay the owners of the cable channels (save TW’s own cable channels, which TW cable can run for free). DSL is usually a phone company offering (there are some independent DSL ISPs), and while the phone company offers the cable channels, they don’t bring them to you directly, they’re merely a billing intermediary between you and DISH Network or DirecTV, and they’re the ones dealing with the cable station owners, not the Telecoms. Now, in the future, the cable companies might twist the arms of the satellite providers, who will then twist the arms of the Telecoms, and then they’ll cap bandwidth.
UDPATE 4/15: CNS has a story about a Rochester, N.Y. telecom shelving monthly caps on its DSL, and mentions in passing a theory that cable broadband providers want to cap their broadband in order to dissuade people from watching the online video streams from various cable TV channels, because they want people to subscribe to their cable service. If that’s the prevailing reason, and not the RIAA and MPAA, then both cable and telecoms have an interest to enact caps. Like I said before, telecoms offer satellite dishes, even in the sense of being a middleman.
UPDATE 4/17: Four Swedish men associated with something called “Pirate Bay” each owe their country a year of their time, and movie and music studios some $3 million in damages. Read this article, and, like the dog that didn’t bark in The Hound of the Baskervilles, notice the “dogs” that didn’t “bark” in this case from Sweden. That’s right, software companies. It’s the RIAA and MPAA types (or their Swedish equivalents) barking here. If you pirate Photoshop, that means you’re not using The GIMP. If you bootleg The Dark Knight, there is no open source equivalent.
