Rich Fiscus
26 Feb 2009 8:48
A German manufacturer of ISP traffic monitoring hardware has issued their annual report on internet traffic trends. Based on a study which focuses on South America, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Europe, the report from ipoque indicates that P2P accounts for more than half of all web traffic.
Concentrating on Germany, where their European data is the most in-depth, P2P volume was actually a smaller percent of total traffic than the previous year. But this was more than offset by general web traffic. According to ipoque this is mostly due to file hosting services like Rapidshare and Megaupload.
You could argue this shows overall file sharing is still growing faster than other traffic, but moving to less transparent venues.
This shows a fundamental flaw with the idea of stopping internet file sharing. If you assume that it can't be stopped, which appears to be the case, the next logical question is how can content owners benefit from it.
One thing that's certain is they're better served by seeing what's going on via P2P than pushing it into the dark corners of the internet and pretending they're stopping it.