Mark Cuban to ISPs: block all P2P traffic

Found on Ars Technica on Thursday, 22 November 2007
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In an open letter to Internet service providers published earlier this week, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban calls for telecoms to put an end to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing. Cuban expresses concerns that P2P "freeloaders" are clogging the tubes with commercial content. His letter doesn't focus on piracy, however, and instead primarily attacks companies that use P2P for legitimate commercial applications.

"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," says Cuban.

"I wanted to offer the best alternative to P2P for audio and video..... Google Video. If you are trying to do distribution of audio or video, why in the world would you use P2P when Google Video will host and distribute it very efficiently and for free?"

Oh, cool, I didn't know that I can upload Linux ISO releases to Google video. Must have missed that announcement. But wait, I am a customer and I do not want them to block P2P traffic because I actually have use for it (unlike Cuban who seems to be unable to grasp the concept). Also, if I compare download speeds between Google video and a torrent, then P2P is way faster what pleases me of course. Next, I pay for the access, not for blocking. If an ISP wants no P2P, it has to say so; let's see who will sign up for them then. Besides, the ISPs received a lot of funds from the government to add bigger tubes, which has not really happened so far. So, if Cuban wants to complain, he should write something like "Dear ISP, please use the money you received for improving your network and do it, because as I customer I want to make use of the service I pay for".