Peer-To-Peer File Sharing Drastically Decreasing

Peer-to-peer file sharing is falling out of favor quickly, according a new report from Arbor Networks, a network-management firm used by more than 70 percent of the world’s top ISPs. In fact, it's falling out of favor so fast that the report declares that P2P is just about dead to ISPs.

“Globally P2P is declining and it is declining quickly,” said Craig Labovitz, the chief scientist at Arbor Networks in a preview of a paper of findings from data collected by Arbor Networks from its customers. Arbor’s Atlas net monitoring tool analyzed traffic from 110 different ISPs on nearly 3,000 routers for a total of 264 exabytes of traffic (an exabyte is about a billion gigabytes). The company’s insight into the net’s core is probably only rivaled the data dug up by the spooks at the NSA, but they're not talking, of course.

According to its sensors, peer-to-peer traffic still accounts for about 18 percent of all net traffic, but was as high as 40 percent in 2007, according to Labovitz.

So what's replaced all that P2P traffic? Streaming video from sites like Hulu.com and YouTube, and download sites like RapidShare and MegaUpload that offer simple download hosting for files of all kinds, with premium and ad-supported accounts now make up the difference.

The fact is, it's easier than ever to get music on the Internet without having to resort to P2P and the possible litigation from the RIAA that using it might bring. Sites like GrooveShark get you just about any song that you want for free as a stream, and as subscription services like MOG and Spotify edge ever closer to mass acceptance (not to mention the threat of a future iTunes subscription service), P2P for downloading music will soon be a thing of the past.