The human incentives are certainly there, it’s the copyright and IP industry that does not want this to come to pass. There was a time when you could find obscure things on torrents with seeders, but that was shut down by the IP rent seeking industry.
I think you’re overestimating how strong that inventive is. There’s a lot that I’d change about the current copyright model but it’s not just rent-seeking keeping P2P from mainstream use: most people do not have high uplink capacity and congestion is a real issue. Companies like Netflix have built a consistent user experience where video plays quickly and smoothly, and the price is low enough that most people aren’t jumping for alternatives — I would bet that if you surveyed the average person the biggest copyright reform they’d want is blocking exclusivity so they could use a single service for everything.
From a business perspective, a big problem is trust and safety. Torrents were also notorious for having mislabeled content or malware, and users are not going to use a system which serves arbitrary content from their IPs, so you have challenges keeping the experience good while building a large enough peer network to provide a competitive experience.
I would bet that if you surveyed the average person the biggest copyright reform they’d want is blocking exclusivity so they could use a single service for everything.
This. While there's definitely piracy before internet, most don't bother because it plays on VHS/DVD. As Gabe Newell stated, the problem of piracy is a service problem.
Isn’t that a result of the push to cable-tvize the internet? Symmetric high bandwidth internet became commonplace during the height of the P2P downloading era where I live. Because the market was there.
I presume it is just a consequence of the enormous costs to build out a fiber network that would yield uncompetitive prices compared to the internet people are willing to accept from their coaxial cable internet providers.
A combination of people do not demand it enough to pay sufficiently to get neighborhoods wired with fiber, and coaxial cable companies having a disincentive to allocate more of their wire capacity to internet bandwidth since they want to avoid becoming a dumb pipe.
The only way out is taxpayer subsidized build out of fiber operated like a utility, such as the system in Chattanooga Tennessee.
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The human incentives are certainly there, it’s the copyright and IP industry that does not want this to come to pass. There was a time when you could find obscure things on torrents with seeders, but that was shut down by the IP rent seeking industry.
I think you’re overestimating how strong that inventive is. There’s a lot that I’d change about the current copyright model but it’s not just rent-seeking keeping P2P from mainstream use: most people do not have high uplink capacity and congestion is a real issue. Companies like Netflix have built a consistent user experience where video plays quickly and smoothly, and the price is low enough that most people aren’t jumping for alternatives — I would bet that if you surveyed the average person the biggest copyright reform they’d want is blocking exclusivity so they could use a single service for everything.
From a business perspective, a big problem is trust and safety. Torrents were also notorious for having mislabeled content or malware, and users are not going to use a system which serves arbitrary content from their IPs, so you have challenges keeping the experience good while building a large enough peer network to provide a competitive experience.
This. While there's definitely piracy before internet, most don't bother because it plays on VHS/DVD. As Gabe Newell stated, the problem of piracy is a service problem.
And also lack of upload capacity for 90% of people due to the lack of symmetric fiber availability.
Isn’t that a result of the push to cable-tvize the internet? Symmetric high bandwidth internet became commonplace during the height of the P2P downloading era where I live. Because the market was there.
I presume it is just a consequence of the enormous costs to build out a fiber network that would yield uncompetitive prices compared to the internet people are willing to accept from their coaxial cable internet providers.
A combination of people do not demand it enough to pay sufficiently to get neighborhoods wired with fiber, and coaxial cable companies having a disincentive to allocate more of their wire capacity to internet bandwidth since they want to avoid becoming a dumb pipe.
The only way out is taxpayer subsidized build out of fiber operated like a utility, such as the system in Chattanooga Tennessee.