Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The Net Neutrality argument wasn't that Google and Netflix would be slowed down, it's that everyone else would.

Of course Google and Netflix were going to pay for peering and priority. The question was if everyone else who wanted to get into the video business should have to do so. Comcast wanted to basically double-bill for traffic: they wanted their customers to pay, and then they wanted the services on the other end to also pay.

This is all a moot question nowadays, because the video market is dramatically different than it was a decade ago. "Free-to-air" content is basically all handled by YouTube and Twitch, both of which are services run by companies with the money to afford the storage costs. "Premium" content fragmented into a bunch of different exclusive providers that already have business relationships with cable companies. So there really isn't a competitive video market being stymied out of existence purely because Comcast wants them to pay in order to compete with cable. The barriers to entry in video got a lot higher than just getting double-billed on bandwidth.

(As an example of this: Floatplane, an early-access "premium" platform for people already on "free-to-air" video platforms, had far more problems getting onto iOS than paying for bandwidth. Apple was their existential threat more than Comcast.)

Net Neutrality has nothing to do with individuals and more to do with "entities"..entities like corporations and other very wealthy edge providers. corpos who are more worried about limiting their competition and using government to ensure they aren't impeded.

> This is all a moot question nowadays, because the video market is dramatically different than it was a decade ago.

With distributed computing & peer-to-peer storage networks such as IPFS, this may not be moot.

I have zero faith in P2P video distribution until copyright liability for watching those videos is shifted off of individuals.

Right now, using something like PeerTube is taking your life into your hands. Look at all of the copyright nonsense that hits otherwise legitimate YouTube channels, and now imagine that they get to sue everyone who watched the video, too.

Centralized services can rely on DMCA 512 for liability limitation; and individual viewers almost certainly do not have copyright liability for merely watching a video on a central service. At the very least, you'd have to subpoena the service to get an IP address, and then subpoena the ISP to get at DHCP logs, and then argue to a court that a user that the temporary copies involved with merely watching a video had infringed your copyright.

When you join a swarm that shares a file, you just broadcast that IP address directly to the person who's going to sue you. That's how these networks work. There's a cottage industry of firms that deliberately "leak" their content to BitTorrent and then sue whoever downloads it; that also applies with PeerTube, IPFS, etc. You don't get DMCA 512 liability limitation because it's your own copyright liability. Furthermore it's easier to argue that someone in a P2P swarm has infringed copyright as there's uploading - further copying - involved. So both practically and theoretically speaking it's far easier to get sued in a P2P system.

Also, P2P video is terrible for mobile use-cases. Mobile devices are leeches in a P2P system - they don't have access to unlimited power like a desktop does. So you either flatten the batteries of everyone on phones, or you detect the use of a battery and lose the benefit of the swarm.

Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. There are many possible configurations & usages for P2P. Data stored on a DHT is one important tech for having people own their own data.

Also, it's ok to have leaches on a P2P system if you can properly incentivize & pay the hosts. Ethereum, FileCoin, IPFS, Holochain a market for hosting data. Ethereum & Holochain will provide a market for hosting apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com