Mark Cuban calls upon providers to block P2P traffic

28th November 2007

Mark Cuban, a famous network activist and a sports billionaire, has published an open letter, which calls on internet-providers to blocking traffic of file-exchange networks.
According to Cuban, the use of peer-to-peer nets is beneficial to only those individuals or entities who distribute materials on the Internet. However, says Cuban, ordinary users paying for broadband internet access are actually spend money on the channels, slaughtered with P2P traffic. Therefore, according to Mark Cuban, blocking traffic of P2P networks will be of use to consumers, because it would increase the speed of access to the internet.
Then Cuban offers an alternative for those users who use file-exchange networks for distribution of audio and video. The billionaire believes that in this case P2P-services can be easily replaced by Google Video service, where you can place free media files for free.
However, the observers of ArsTechnica have a quite right doubt: what is the difference in overloading the channels by downloading files from the P2P networks or from Google Video? In addition, such networks are used not only for the distribution of music and videos. For example, they are used to download software with the open source. It is unlikely that Google Video can be helpful in this case.
It is noticeable, that beforehands Mark Cuban was not such categorical against file-exchange networks. Thus, in due course the billionaire provided financial support to a R2R-network Grokster in the proceedings of this service with the record and movie companies. In addition, Cuban invested 1.7 million dollars to another R2R-comany Red Swoosh. Nevertheless, now Cuban is opposed to such networks.