[zackmorris]

No I'm definitely not trolling, but I get that a lot :-)

I've seen several papers and presentations about web-based hashing schemes, where the idea is that you only have to download data once to a city and then people could download using a hash from a local cache server and avoid trips over the backbone:

http://www8.org/w8-papers/2a-webserver/caching/paper2.html

For example, if they did this with netflix, you'd be downloading from your neighbors instead of a server somewhere, and the load on your service provider would drop by orders of magnitude.

Also, since so little traffic would have to go over the whole web, they could focus more on last mile speed increases and we could all have 100 megabit lines and cheaper plans, getting charged mostly for our backbone traffic, the way long distance used to be charged.