Subject: [alto] Problems with the Alto problem statement

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:47:36 -0800

Greetings. draft-marocco-alto-problem-statement-03 mixes two types of problem statements in a way that might confuse some readers. It covers both:

A: the problem of the large amount of P2P traffic seen on the current Internet

B: the problem of how to provide useful network information to applications

The proposed solution space for Alto will probably do nearly nothing for Problem A. Most BitTorrent traffic, which is often said to account for nearly 50% of all ISP traffic, comes from communities that would get no advantage from any of the proposed Alto solutions.

Most of the large BitTorrent communities *want* more users who are further away topologically from well-connected users, or have slower connectivity, so that the community grows. In exchange for slightly lower speed, those communities get much more stability by having torrents seeded for a longer time and more people who are willing to seed "long tail" material.

Further, any Alto solution that involves an application telling a server specific files that it is interested in, or even asking which of a list of other users would be best to communicate with, will only be useful if the user of that application is willing to directly reveal to his/her ISP what they are asking for or who they want to share with. For legitimate content, that is probably not so much of an issue. For content whose legality is questionable, it is a huge issue.

In short, an Alto might work for some scenarios, but it is pretty much irrelevant for the scenario that concerns many people now, which is the huge and growing amount of BitTorrent traffic on the net today. Therefore, any discussion of current problems with this BitTorrent traffic should be removed from the problem statements draft. Otherwise, someone reading it as part of the suite of Alto specification might think that Alto will be useful for this problem. The problems Alto might be useful for are quite different than what we have today.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium
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