This article is a collection of straw men. It extrapolates the failure of one dot-com era startup (Mojo Nation) into the extremely wide ranging thesis
> As it turns out, bandwidth — and most computational resources — are simply too cheap to meter.
This is patently false, as bandwidth and all other computational resources are metered on a huge scale today, by centralized cloud computing and ISP companies.
It's even false for BitTorrent. The article describes BitTorrent with
> After Mojo Nation’s demise, a former employee stripped the token incentives out of the protocol and created a simple tit-for-tat filesharing system.
However, most serious BitTorrent users are active on trackers which require a certain seed:leech ratio, thereby metering the user's contribution. The fact that no money is involved has more to do with the fact that most of them are used to share files in violation of copyright, not because of some intrinsic law of computational resources being "too cheap to meter".
It also references some hare-brained scheme cooked up by Enron shortly before their collapse to claim that bandwidth cannot be traded, and makes the false assertion that all peering and internet transit today is free.
> As it turns out, bandwidth — and most computational resources — are simply too cheap to meter.
This is patently false, as bandwidth and all other computational resources are metered on a huge scale today, by centralized cloud computing and ISP companies.
It's even false for BitTorrent. The article describes BitTorrent with
> After Mojo Nation’s demise, a former employee stripped the token incentives out of the protocol and created a simple tit-for-tat filesharing system.
However, most serious BitTorrent users are active on trackers which require a certain seed:leech ratio, thereby metering the user's contribution. The fact that no money is involved has more to do with the fact that most of them are used to share files in violation of copyright, not because of some intrinsic law of computational resources being "too cheap to meter".
It also references some hare-brained scheme cooked up by Enron shortly before their collapse to claim that bandwidth cannot be traded, and makes the false assertion that all peering and internet transit today is free.