Tribler – Search and stream torrents

There are no guarantees that p2p traffic will be local.

A fair point, but trivially discounted because a single download can be propagated to everyone in a city. So when a new episode of Game of Thrones comes out, the first person to get it forwards it to everyone else in the swarm and the download gets exponentially faster with each peer. Bittorrent could easily (and probably is in some implementations) tuned to favor low latency, which would start with the nearest peers. Sure a CDN accomplishes the same thing, but it’s a larger sunk cost than using a few spare megabytes on people’s hard drives.

The connection from your home to the ISP is anything but a one-time cost.

In fact the last mile to your home is the most expensive part of your Internet connection.

This has been used as an excuse to slow the rollout of broadband for a long time. I remember when they installed the new orange fiber optic cables along the freeway where I live back in the 90s. It must have been a monumental task. And they are a permanent choke point, with the internet growing year after year, so the fee to use those lines can really only go up until more are laid. They are the reason that some ISPs limit traffic to 200 GB per month, not the load on the router for your last mile connection.

And yes, the sunk cost of the last mile connection is also expensive, but it’s amortized by future subscribers getting connected. But at some point, the rate of new subscribers will fall to the point where even that is negligible. I think we passed that point sometime in the late 2000s, about the time that my mom got broadband in her town of 15,000.

The cost of maintaining a substation and routers for hundreds or thousands of subscribers against their monthly subscription fees of $50-100 per month doesn’t pass the sniff test. Most of the costs are going to be in tech support and installation, and ISPs are notorious for taking too long to make this stuff plug n play so I don’t have any sympathy for them there.

ISPs are punting now, because it’s cheaper than making the last push to get everyone connected at the 100 Mb speeds the cable lines are capable of. They don’t want to lay new backbone, and I can’t blame them there. But the internet finds a way, and if it weren’t for the legal shenanigans of companies like HBO shutting off people’s internet, protocols like Bittorrent would have become a mainstream layer below HTTP years ago. So why would laws like the DMCA exist? To spawn the CDN industry and pour billions of dollars into building data centers that are largely unnecessary, by giving companies the legal leverage they need to pitch it.