According to this TechRepublic post (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/t...), the majority of internet traffic is actually P2P traffic. Anywhere from 49 to 89 percent of all internet traffic reportedly falls into this category.
P2P traffic means "peer to peer." It's file-sharing traffic happening between two "peered" computers rather than from one central server to many individual computers. YouTube, for example, is a centralized video site that serves videos directly to millions of computers. The Pirate Bay, on the other hand (www.ThePirateBay.org) is a site that lists links to peer-to-peer sharing files so that individual computer users can share files amongst each other, bypassing centralized websites or file servers.
Peer-to-peer traffic carries the latest movies, music albums, television shows, ebooks, podcasts, graphic novels and even... yes... porn. A search on The Pirate Bay today shows downloads for Heroes Season 4 Episode 7 (350MB), the new Bruce Willis movie Surrogates
Porn represents a sizable percentage of all P2P traffic. Although "official" statistics were difficult to find, according to TopTenReviews.com (http://internet-filter-review.topte...), internet pornography revenues in the U.S. were $2.8 billion (2006). There are 4.2 million porn websites on the 'net, and 25% of all search engine requests are porn-related. Importantly, this page claims that (700MB) and even a bootleg version of the new Windows 7 operating system (3.5GB). These files are obviously not small. When peered computers share these files, it requires a tremendous amount of bandwidth.35% of all P2P traffic is porn-related.
Where am I going with all this? Well, if you consider that roughly 50% of all internet traffic is P2P, and that roughly one-third of all P2P traffic is porn, then it quickly becomes obvious that if the GAO's pandemic clogging of the internet becomes a reality, porn might bring down Wall Street!
What this also means, however, is that cutting off access to specific websites (like YouTube) will likely do very little to free up internet bandwidth. To have any real impact on reducing bandwidth usage, the U.S. government would need to run public service ads begging internet users to stop downloading porn. The problem with that approach is that people who pirate porn are probably not the kind of people who obediently follow the advice of the feds.
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