

How to Fix BitTorrent, the Startup? - diego
http://gigaom.com/2008/08/06/open-thread-how-to-fix-bittorrent-the-startup/

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SwellJoe
Before BitTorrent became a company, and I was operating my first startup
(which was a web caching and website acceleration appliance vendor), I thought
that an amazing business could be built on making BitTorrent a competitive
advantage for ISPs rather than merely a huge bandwidth cost. The problem with
BitTorrent is that it's wonderful for consumers, and horrible for ISPs. Help
solve the ISPs problems while providing better consumer service, and you've
got something that ISPs would pay huge for.

Technically I'm not exactly sure how it would be solved...you'd have to look
to Akamai for starters, since they've solved the data locality problem in
interesting ways. Basically, you'd probably have an aggressive local caching
BT tracker and a friendly deal with all of your peering partners to provide
lower cost lower priority BT traffic during slow hours. I tinkered with a BT
cache for a little while, but gave it up when BitTorrent the company came into
existence as I assumed they'd be on that problem in no time, and with the
BitTorrent name would be the champs of the block in no time. Turns out, they
have no idea how to make BT make money.

Of course, I could be wrong. Millions of consumers vs. a few thousand ISPs
makes for a hard decision to make, and a startup usually can't address both
markets successfully. And, of course, the only way a BT cache could work is if
it were active, like usenet, and was pulling new stuff all the time rather
than just on request like a web cache. Which brings up more interesting
copyright issues.

