Fergie (Paul Ferguson) "The popularity of file-sharing is costing the largest Internet service providers $10 million per year each in bandwidth and network maintenance costs, CacheLogic said."

$10 million a year for the largest ISPs is a drop in the sea; _if_ the figure is accurate (sounds reasonable to me) what's the point anyway? The largest ISPs serve directly or indirectly millions of users that each pay $20/mo which is $240/yr, 10 million bucks a year is nothing.

"It estimates Internet users around the globe freely exchange a staggering 10 petabytes -- or 10 million gigabytes -- of data, much of it in the form of copyright-protected songs, movies, software and video games."

This sounds a reasonable figure to me if it's per day traffic. Ballpark figures are: - Common estimates are that there are 30 to 40 million Americans sharing files, less than 100 million worldwide. - My personal estimate is that at any given time some 15 million are on-line (a few large networks have 1+ million simultaneous users, plus some other with numbers in the hundreds of thousands). - 10 petabytes per day breaks out to an average of 60kbit/s per simultaneous user, which seems reasonable to me; some still have dial-up but broadband is widely deployed, NTM the few that operate a high-end P4T PC with a GE NIC connected to an OC-48 (someone checks my math please?). Michel.