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Comment by anilgulecha | Hacker News Reader

Peer5 - This is malware on your browser, and they are abusing the webrtc protocol for their business usecase.

Until they provide a clear opt-in usage behavior, this opinion will not change. Clearly if their proposition is about better streaming service/quality, this is trivially testable by how many users opt-in to their network when viewing videos.

Their endpoints should be added to easylist. This is very big concern for metered users, who'll see their usage spike. Is there a list of peer5 endpoints?

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WebRTC allows you to connect directly to the IP addresses of other people viewing the same video as you (no fixed list), but their JavaScript could easily be detected & blocked. The value prop isn't a better streaming experience. It's that their customers don't have to pay hardly anything to serve their content and it's distributed so it's far more resilient to network outages. It shouldn't be tough to tell if someone is on a metered connected by looking at their ASN. I'm hoping they do that.

I understand their value-prop well enough (saving broadcasters CDN $$). I just find it shitty that their bottom-line is based off of the end-user's bandwidth without their opt-in consent.

The only way to tackle this is public denunciation of their model, hand in hand with browser based blocks -- either easylist/uBlock, or Chrome/Firefox/et-al modifying the browser protocols/UX to disallow this leeching without the user's knowledge.

At Peer5, our customers are the broadcasters who operate streaming services throughout the world. The users are theirs, not ours, and it is up to the broadcasters to decide how they want to message / roll-out p2p services. Some choose to opt people in by default and allow them to opt out. Others choose the opposite approach. Our job is to give our customers the tools they need to create and enforce whatever business rules they feel are appropriate. This includes looking at ASN numbers to identify ISPs that operate metered services and turning off upstream sharing for such users. No one is forced to participate in a Peer5 mesh network. And the value proposition is most definitely better streaming, especially for the biggest / most popular streams as these benefit the most from a p2p solution. We have plenty of data from users all over the world to support this.

Sure, and ad-networks asked sites to use their solutions appropriately on the users browsers.

You're giving your customers tools to abuse the internet commons. You should be called out for it. Afterall your revenue is an exact function of user's bandwidth. Quoting from your pricing page:

> "Only data delivered via P2P counts against your plan."

You can always opt out my friend. The problem we're trying to solve is a real consumer issue - there is no shortage of stories in the press about how poorly the streaming services perform, especially during the largest events (Superbowl, new eps of Game of Thrones, etc). And this is only the beginning of the streaming revolution.

I'm sorry if this is the case, and I missed it. Can you please link to the information on how to opt-out?

By this logic, torrents are destroying the internet commons: this is basically running torrents in the users browser, but for content that they are legally allowed to consume. I think you need to step of your hobby horse here.

Torrent users opt-in, by adding the magnetlink/torrent into the app.

Presumably, so would Peer5 users by doing things like picking the cheaper streaming host with the superior quality. And by the way - what's so precious in your mind about uplink bandwidth? How does the direction of the bits from my computer make this a moral case for you?

Assuming you're asking in good-faith: it's not the direction of bits that's the concern, it's the number of bits. End users should have the option of opting-in their metered bits towards Peer5's CDN revenue.

I am, and that's like saying you should be able to opt in to google's adwords revenue when using google.

Consider these scenarios:

1. A user visits a website, sees a video player, and watches a video.

2. A user visits a website, sees an article, and reads it.

There may be some confusion about whether your technology will still force Scenario #2's user into your P2P network, and use their bandwidth. I'd argue that Scenario #1 is legit for your purposes, but not #2.

Are there any steps that can be taken to prevent sneaky behavior?

With Peer5, Scenario #2 will never happen. Only users who are watching the same video (from the same broadcaster) will participate in p2p sharing.

Also once you close the tab, it's gone. No background webrtc as far as I'm aware of.

I think people are overreacting here.

IMHO ads are far more intrusive than sharing your upstream bandwidth with others, they also waste your attention and incept ideas in your mind. This is why some people choose to opt-out and use ad-blockers, and that's ok.

But as long as we want to get free quality content, publishers have to see some profit (And I'm ok with that). You opt-in to many things when you visit a website on a regular basis, and tools like peer5 are just one of these things.

(Fixed typo)

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