Isn’t the web distributed now? No really, let me illustrate– ever IM your friend that is near you “Hey, wanna see a cool video? check out this URL”? Then they download the same video you just downloaded from the original server even though it might be a long way away, rather than from your machine. This is slow, expensive, wasteful, and well, dumb.

What if, with no browser or server config other than maybe downloading a plug-in:

all bigger files come from the folks near you or the original server, whatever is faster?

What if the website gets to keep download counts, and keep their website up-to-date.

Website gets get reduced bandwidth bills, and get superstar user satisfaction because of faster speed than YouTube

Web users, even in remote countries, get that “I am sitting on a gig-e network in palo alto” feel.

Less money goes to monopoly phone companies.

Is a real problem? Yes:

Internet Archive servers 2million people each day. Egyptians and Japanese are two of our most popular user communities.

They download the same files over and over. There is someone with the file that is closer to them than us.

the 20gigabits/sec of bandwidth costs us a fortune.

others want to serve video, but don’t because of the cost.

others host on youtube, or amazon, or archive.org but would rather not.

Would be great, right? What it takes:

A browser plug-in, and eventually get the browsers to do it natively.

When a user clicks, the browser starts downloading from a site (the site then gets the download credit)

Website serves unique hash for the file and the length of the file in the header and then serves the file as normal (archive.org and other sites do this already)

Browser looks up the hashcode in a “trackerless p2p” system, I think bittorrent can be used for this.

If others have it via p2p, then it gets it from those users as well, so it is not slower than getting it from the website

After the browser downloads it, they offer it to others via p2p.

What do we get?

Less expense for web site owners operators, but keeps them in control and in the loop

Faster and less expensive for users

More sites taking control of their own stuff (don’t need to give your files to remote organizations)

Being far from the server is not as much of a penalty

Who can help?

people that can help debug the idea (and maybe it is already done…)

browser plug-in programmers

p2p super distributed trackerless hashcode knowledgable folks

the Internet Archive will seed all of its files for this system.

we need enthusiasm, a cool logo/mascot, and coffee.

Please comment on this post as a first round to see if we can debug the idea and get critical mass.

-brewster