A decline in P2P-sharing
I just read an article on Tweakers that Ipoque, a German company that sells ‘deep packet inspection-hardware’, has published a study on the distribution of protocol classes. This chart is a representation of their findings.
With the ‘deep packet inpection-hardware’ internet Providers can analyse internet traffic. This hardware also enables providers to regulate the traffic by providing the ability to filtering and prioritize certain protocols. As a result, P2P-traffic is declining. Be that as it may, more interesting to me is the fact that Tweakers mentions the decline of P2P over the ‘normal’ web traffic. I think we could better speak of P2P-traffic as being the norm because of its hegemony. Anyway, the regional coverage of the study has been extended to include eight regions of the world, namely: Australia, Eastern Europe, Germany, the Middle East and Southern Europe, Northern and Southern Africa, South America and Southern Europe. The data that has been analyzed is of one provider/region. The amount of users per region differs between 50.000 and 250.000.
Here are some of the key findings of the study summed up. (published by here):
- P2P generates most traffic in all regions
- The proportion of P2P traffic has decreased BitTorrent is still number one of all protocols, HTTP second.
- The proportion of eDonkey is much lower than last year.
- File hosting has considerably grown in popularity.
- Streaming is taking over P2P users for video content
- Usenet, a file sharing alternative for P2P, appears in the statistics for the first time
Would the decline of (war on) P2P-traffic be a result of the ‘creative property’-right lobbyists?
Would this decline worsen the ability to get a hold on ‘creative property’ from of which we get inspired to create our own?
Would this be the end of ‘free culture’?
there is an EXCELLENT article on ars technica, which is very lucid and balanced and which i have just read with great pleasure, that delves deeper into deep packet inspection and its relation to network neutrality. I hope the Master classes can devote some time to the subject, if that’s not the case already
article link ->
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/07/Deep-packet-inspection-meets-net-neutrality.ars