Update: It turns out Netflix is researching peer-to-peer architecture. Here's our new report.

BitTorrent, Inc. CEO Eric Klinker claims that peer-to-peer architecture can "re-architecture the Web for equality," and he urged Netflix to try it out.

The Federal Communications Commission is on track to endorse pay-for-play arrangements in which Web services like video streaming and VoIP could pay ISPs for a faster path to consumers than other services receive.

"This is by its very definition discrimination," Klinker wrote in a blog post yesterday.

But what if the Web worked differently? Klinker writes:

Many smart researchers are already thinking about this problem. Broadly speaking, this re-imagined Internet is often called Content Centric Networking. The closest working example we have to a Content Centric Network today is BitTorrent. What if heavy bandwidth users, say, Netflix, for example, worked more like BitTorrent? If they did, each stream—each piece of content—would have a unique address, and would be streamed peer-to-peer. That means that Netflix traffic would no longer be coming from one or two places that are easy to block. Instead, it would be coming from everywhere, all at once; from addresses that were not easily identified as Netflix addresses—from addresses all across the Internet. To the ISP, they are simply zeroes and ones. All equal.

Comcast was caught interfering with BitTorrent traffic in 2007, leading to an agreement between Comcast and BitTorrent the next year.

"As we know from experience, it’s not so easy to block or censor a Content Centric Network," Klinker wrote. "Historically, attacks from ISPs seeking to spoof the BitTorrent protocol have been easily solved with encryption, assuming an ISP wanted to take such steps of manipulating traffic on their network."

"Decentralized technology could reintroduce equality into the post-neutral web; solving what regulation will not," he continued.

Would Netflix change its architecture? Probably not, but the company floated the idea recently when it was arguing that it shouldn't have to pay Comcast for a direct connection to the edge of its network.

"[W]hen we ask [ISPs] if we too would qualify for no-fee interconnect if we changed our service to upload as much data as we download—thus filling their upstream networks and nearly doubling our total traffic—there is an uncomfortable silence," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote last month. "That's because the ISP argument isn't sensible. Big ISPs aren't paying money to services like online backup that generate more upstream than downstream traffic. Data direction, in other words, has nothing to do with costs."