Are leechers ruining the Internet?

There is an interesting and quite topical little discussion going on over at the Whirlpool forums asking are P2P users ruining the Internet . The Whirlpool forums usually resemble a bunch of 12-year-olds squabbling over the merits of various sporting teams, but this question, if not the discussion it spawned, is quite interesting. Given the apparent demographic profile of Whirlpool users (teenage boys who spend their nights and weekends downloading movies, games and porn – big P2P users), they're almost overwhelmingly voting in the negative.

That particular discussion was prompted by one of the more popular ISPs for big downloaders, Internode, raising its prices quite significantly. The 'node was quite popular on Whirlpool, but recent decisions such as removing access to its NNTP server, had dampened enthusiasm somewhat. Thus the leechers have been on the lookout for another high-throughput ISP.

Many of the arguments for the negative on the aforementioned thread state that the ISP provides a certain monthly download limit, and thus the users are justified in utilising that to its full extent. The argument against this is that the prices charged by ISPs assume a certain level of bandwidth utilisation, making allowance for a small number of outliers, and that if the prices for service reflected the true price of allocating the full bandwidth for each user, no one would be able to afford them. The problem is that usage patterns which were, until recently, outliers, are now increasingly becoming the norm.

Traditionally, P2P users have predominantly been downloading illegal content. Whilst it's possible to go through 20 gigabytes a month in Linux CD images, no sane person would do so. But this is changing. Popular games like World of Warcraft use P2P-style systems to download large game updates. Some internet telephony systems like Skype use P2P strategies to connect to users behind firewalls. And the hot new kids on the block, internet TV program Joost will burn through about 1 gigabyte for every three hours of (legal) TV that you use. Throw in a subscription to "vodcasted" programs like The Chaser's War on Everything, and you can chew up plenty of data in a perfectly legal way.

Still, everyone is talking about the pipes, but no one is considering the cost of the water that's travelling through them. The federal coalition has just announced a broadband infrastructure plan, which, by offering faster broadband to urban areas, doesn't do anything that ASDL 2+ doesn't do now. Labor has had a similar policy out for some time now.

Given the changing usage patterns, broadband data access is about the only thing in the IT world which has been getting more expensive in the past year or two. Telstra currently charges between $90 and $160 a month for useful amounts of data, compared to $30 a month for phone line rental (arguably an equivalent essential service). Whilst Telstra has probably the highest margins in the market, other services are going to have to approach these prices to account for the fact that much more of the bandwidth they are selling is actually being used – either that or go out of business.

So why are data costs in Australia so high? I'm not entirely sure, but mostly it's because we live on an island, which has to be wired to other countries using expensive cables (or satellites, but they have high latency – data moves across them much more slowly), and there are only a few of those cables. And Australia is a net importer of data. Most web sites and P2P services accessed by Australians bring data into Australia from overseas, and that data has to travel over a small number of international connections.

Maybe the real intervention we need from government is in the way of support for international network infrastructure. Just as government pays for road and rail links between states, why shouldn't it be putting some of our tax dollars towards more bandwidth on our international net links. It can then lease bandwidth at cost to the ISPs and telecommunications companies. It seems that this is an area with much less robust competition than the national broadband ISP market.