At the height of the Napster debacle, colleges and universities across
the country struggled to find a solution to a novel problem posed by
the killer app. It wasn't copyright violations which troubled network
administrators at colleges, but rather the bandwidth-intensive nature
of Napster. Napster and other P2P applications had and continue to
have the potential to demolish a smaller academic institution's
bandwidth capacity. While major universities, especially those
located in metropolitan areas, have enough cash on hand to provide
their students with a huge pipeline to the internet, the cost of
bringing smaller, rural colleges online at high speeds is quite high.
In late-2000, at the height of Napster's reign, most smaller colleges
were still equipped with antiquated connections to the internet: a
frame-relay T1 line or two left over from schools' push to network
themselves in the mid-1990s. The bandwidth provided by these older
connections simply couldn't handle applications such as Napster, which
demanded a far larger pipeline than schools were financially capable
of providing. The result? Napster slowed internet use of all kinds:
web browsing, FTP, even email.
After toying with the idea of banning Napster - a notion which smacked
to many students and administrators of censorship - schools hit upon a
solution. Instead of banning Napster outright, why not simply reduce
the bandwidth it could use, and thus free up space for other traffic.
At the same time as they touted their commitment to free speech,
schools purchased "traffic shaping" devices at $10,000 a pop. Instead
of blocking web sites or certain applications directly, traffic
shaping limited the use of certain protocols available to students.
The net result was that web browsing and other "legitimate" uses of
the internet were again possible, but a student who attempted to use
Napster's internet protocol to download music or tried to stream audio
and video with RealAudio or Quicktime found speeds to be so low as to
render such use impossible. While the tactic of traffic shaping was
thus not censorship per se, it limited students' access to certain
content on the internet.
While Napster is now all but gone, P2P is on the rise. New file
sharing programs are being developed every day, often faster than the
RIAA can say "sue." As the demand for bandwidth increases, will
schools feel the need to further tighten controls on internet use,
privileging one type of content over another? Is this a form of
censorship?
