[throwawaaarrgh]

ISPs killed P2P. Even if you have the upstream to seed all day, they'll just rate-limit you. There is no monetary incentive for them to allow P2P anyway.

That said.... Gnutella/Gnutella2, eDonkey2000, and others were objectively crappy designs, but still worked very well at one use case: distributing rare files. The thing is, if you have a stable high-speed mirror, the files aren't rare anymore. Hence the only files that are rare are the illegal ones, or ones that can't find a mirror to host them. There's just not much point to P2P. Sometimes there's good reason to distribute illegal files, like getting past state censorship. But the whole world isn't going to adopt a wonky solution for a rare use-case. Hence P2P has not & will not take off.

[Reventlov]

> ISPs killed P2P. Even if you have the upstream to seed all day, they'll just rate-limit you. There is no monetary incentive for them to allow P2P anyway.

I don't know where you live, but in the EU we tend to take the net neutrality seriously, and that does not happen.

[5e92cb50239222b]

Same here, but for a different reason. An interesting situation happened about ten years ago.

The largest BitTorrent tracker in the country was shut down by authorities for obvious reasons: Linux ISOs were far from the most popular uploads shared there.

Our ISP monopoly (which was owned by someone very close to the Supreme Leader's family) immediately saw a significant drop in traffic, and (according to hearsay, I had no way to check this) clients started leaving off in droves as they had no use for a fast internet connection anymore. 'Foreign' torrent trackers and video streaming were not very practical because of bad connectivity back then.

So the tracker was restored less than a week later and worked fine for about a decade after that.

Corruption finally worked for the good of the community.

[Karrot_Kream]

In the US, ISPs offer lower uplink speeds than downlink speeds as a cost cutting measure. More modem channels will be dedicated to downlink than uplink. With fiber ISPs this is beginning to change, but ISP quality in the US quality is highly variable.

[m4rtink]

Sadly this is not unheard off in Europe as well - for example here in Czech Republic I had to get the highest tier 1 Gbit/s dow load cable connection (including modem exchange) to get a measly 50 Mbit/s upload. And all the lower tiers have much less.

Thankfully not all local cable ISPs are like this, but that's what was available. And I don't think they can do this for much longer due to proliferation of cloud backups, teleconferencing, desktop/game streaming, etc.

[dale_glass]

It's not so much a cost cutting measure as a competition measure.

A given channel has only so much bandwidth. In DSL and the like, you can pick which part is dedicated to up, and which to down because you only have one pair of wires to work with.

So your link gives you say, 100 Mbps. You can split that 50/50, but then your competition can go with a 90/10 split, and look, their downloads are much faster!

[Karrot_Kream]

Right, it allows them to offer smaller pipes of 100 Mbit to users, which is a form of cost cutting. A true internet connection, the kind you'd get with your box in a colo or peering direct to an ISP or at an IX has symmetric uplink and downlink. The ISP is only willing to sell, say, 100 Mbit rather than the 180 Mbit equivalent a symmetric connection would provide.

[tete]

I'd say vendor lock-ins and mobile killed P2P.

With people replacing more and more laptop and desktop usage the platforms are Android and iOS. On both of these you essentially have to pay to release software, on top of that people more frequently have to pay for traffic, which oftentimes is in some for of ISP NAT, which might mean no or only certain incoming connections.

I think these platforms are the biggest inhibitor for P2P and actually also new technologies, because they are extremely constrained in what you can do compared to a typical desktop OS/environment.