The power of P2P

CNET News.com's Marguerite Reardon defends of peer-to-peer technology:

Peer-to-peer technology has gotten a bad rap for years, but a group of Internet service providers led by Verizon Communications is working to harness the technology to reduce network traffic and speed up video downloads on the Web.

Since the days of file-sharing networks like Napster, which allowed people to exchange songs on their computer hard drives with others on the Internet, peer-to-peer technology has been demonized in the press. The entertainment industry has pegged it as a tool for piracy. And recently, ISPs have blamed it for clogging their networks.

But the technology, which was originally developed for the research community to share huge files over the Internet, is increasingly being used by legitimate video distribution services like the BBC's iPlayer, voice over Internet Protocol service Skype, and Internet video start-up Joost. And as more high-bandwidth applications like video make their way onto the Web, peer-to-peer, or P2P as it's commonly called, will be used even more. This means that Internet service providers and content owners will have to find ways to work with the powerful P2P technology--whether they want to or not--if they hope to survive.

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