No doubt Dr. Roberts is far smarter than I could ever hope to be. Heck, all by himself, evidently, he started the internet while I was still in the second grade.

But nevertheless there are two aspects of his narrative here that strike me as odd.

The first is the statement that “80% of the traffic on the internet is P2P.” What does that mean? 80% at a particular point? At a particular time? Or 80% of all internet traffic on the planet over an extended period of time? If it’s the later, how is that measured?

Rule #1 in avoiding hyperbole: always be suspicious of broad statements of this sort. Maybe the internet really was doubling in size every 100 days back in the late 1990s but if we’d all have been a little more skeptical maybe the train wreck of the early part of this decade wouldn’t have occurred.

Second, and I’ve heard this a lot recently, “x percent of users are consuming y percent of bandwidth” where x is a small number and y is a big number. This immediately strikes people as unfair. It seems to imply that x percent of the users should consume x percent of the bandwidth. But few systems, other than the old USSR, really work that way (and even the USSR didn’t).

Light Reading’s Phil Harvey came up with a useful parallel to help put this “problem” in perspective. A small minority of people check out a majority of library books. Should we institute reader throttling to correct this inequity?

just give it up anagran man, if the riaa couldn’t shut down bt, neither can you