Re: What about the ISP's who throttle BitTorrents?
Stealing bandwidth yes, and you forgot electricity: when the CPU runs the BT program to serve chunks to others, you pay the electricity, the SSD being worn out, etc...
But on a global scale, BT is much more efficient for this sort of task than direct download.
The task we are contemplating is distributing a chunk of several gigabytes of data to 350M computers around the word.
If you place servers only in Redmond, not only you need a lot of servers and bandwidth to be reasonably quick, but you also use up a lot of "international" bandwidth (peering). Indeed, you can do better and use things like CDN that will duplicate the content around the globe and provide a shorter route.
BT naturally optimizes all that. It will obviously exchange more data with a PC that is on the same LAN, simply because it is much faster, than with a PC at the end of the world.
We had this discussion at length in France when Sarkozy government put in place stupid Hadopi that banned P2P.... and now eveyone uses direct download to the great dismay of ISP that saw their peering bill explode.
But again, you are very right, the protocol being much more efficient on a global scale should not be an excuse for M$ to make their users pay for it!
Everyday that passes by, I'm more and more happy to have completely left this hell 8 years ago. ;-)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
