> > I think it would be absolutely *stunning* for content providers > to turn the model on its head; use a bittorrent like model for > caching and serving content out of subscribers homes at > recalcitrant ISPs, so that data doesn't come from outside, > it comes out of the mesh within the eyeball network, with > no clear place for the ISP to stick a $$$ bill to. >
I'm familiar with some work and ideas that have gone into such a thing, and I'm personally very much against it for non-technical reasons. Given how far the law lags behind technology, the last thing anyone should be ok with is a 3rd party storing bits on ANYTHING in their house, or transmitting those bits from a network connection that is registered to them. On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 4:06 PM Matthew Petach <mpet...@netflight.com> wrote: > > > On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 1:01 AM Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa> wrote: > >> However, in an era where content is making a push to get as close to the >> eyeballs as possible, kit getting cheaper and faster because of merchant >> silicon, and abundance of aggregated capacity at exchange points, can we >> leverage the shorter, faster links to change the model? >> >> Mark. >> > > I think it would be absolutely *stunning* for content providers > to turn the model on its head; use a bittorrent like model for > caching and serving content out of subscribers homes at > recalcitrant ISPs, so that data doesn't come from outside, > it comes out of the mesh within the eyeball network, with > no clear place for the ISP to stick a $$$ bill to. > > Imagine you've got a movie; you slice it into 1,000 > encrypted chunks; you make part of your license > agreement for customers a requirement that they > will allow you to use up to 20GB of disk space on > their computer and to serve up data chunks into > the network in return for a slightly cheaper monthly > subscription cost to your service. You put 1 slice > of that movie on each of 1,000 customers in a > network; then you replicate that across the next > thousand customers, and again for the next > thousand, until you've got enough replicas of > each shard to handle a particular household > going offline. Your library is still safe from > piracy, no household has more than 1/1000th of a > movie locally, and they don't have the key to decrypt > it anyhow; but they've got 1/1000th of 4,0000 different > movies, and when someone in that ISP wants to watch the > movie, the chunks are being fetched from other households > within the eyeball network. The content provider would have > shard servers in region, able to serve up any missing shards that > can't be fetched locally within the ISP--but the idea would be that > as the number of subscribers within an ISP goes up, instead of the > ISP seeing a large, single-point-source increase in traffic, what they > see is an overall increase in east-west traffic among their users. > > Because the "serving of shards to others" happens primarily while the > user is actively streaming content, you have a natural bell curve; during > peak streaming times, you have more nodes active to serve up shards, > handling the increased demand; at lower demand times, when fewer > people are active, and there's fewer home-nodes to serve shards, the > content network's shard servers can pick up the slack...but that'll > generally > only happen during lower traffic times, when the traffic won't be > competing > and potentially causing pain for the ISP. > > Really, it seems like a win-win scenario. > > I'm confident we'll see a content network come out with a model like this > within the next 5 years, at which point the notion of blackmailing content > networks for additional $$$s will be a moot point, because the content > will > be distributed and embedded within every major eyeball network already, > whether they like it or not, on their customer's devices. > > Let's check back in 2026, and see if someone's become fantastically > successful doing this or not. ;) > > Thanks! > > Matt > >
