Thankfully, some of the leading players in the industry paid attention to our call. Akamai’s Bill Wishon contacted us in response to the article to discuss “some inaccuracies … that needed correction.” Some of the issues that were discussed during this call were summarized by Wishon in a comment here. While we welcome Akamai’s efforts to help us address potential “inaccuracies”, we feel that it is a little one-sided.

Here are excerpts from their statement which attempts to address the transparency issue:

Akamai has had a user bill of rights and design principles published on our website for a few years now and have been using them to guide our development and design decisions. The guidelines you posted from Solid State Networks seem to align with these principles and perhaps take a more gaming centric perspective…

The NetSession EULA does state that our software runs as a background service, this is also stated in the technical info on our site.

Transparency: Our software is visible in the normal places you would expect to manage a system service on the platform you are on.

The problem with Akamai’s statement is that it does nothing to address the frustration expressed by so many users that do not appreciate that P2P software has been installed on their systems without their knowledge. Instead, it seems to imply that Akamai believes that its “commitment” to transparency has been met through the EULA disclosure.

Of course, this might be true if one assumes that every user carefully reads the EULA to learn that a system service is being installed by Akamai. But it also assumes that all users will understand what a service is and how and where a service operates on their system. This is just not a realistic expectation for almost any subset of Internet users, including online gamers. And nowhere in the EULA are the implications of a having a continuously running P2P client on the user’s system conveyed.

Also, upon examining Akamai’s user “Bill of Rights” we are informed that “Users have the right to know what their Akamai NetSession Interface is doing at all times.” This sounds great, until we read on to find that this functionality is provided through a command line tool. This hardly seems aligned with the model of transparency advocated within Solid State Networks’ best practices as Bill Wishon suggests.

It is apparent from the number of blog and forum posts available from Google searches that both Pando and Akamai have been aware for some time that many consumers are upset by their stealth operational tactics. TorrentFreak reader Delusion points us to his own run-in with Pando and response from Pando management which is detailed on his blog back in February.

There simply are no valid technical reasons that prevent either of these companies from providing a real-time and accessible view of their applications’ activity and its impact on user resources. Therefore, one might conclude that the lack of visibility of their P2P applications is by design and that they are most concerned with their own self-interests at the expense of all consumers. After all, these companies stand to profit a great deal from selling their services using end user’s bandwidth that ultimately costs them nothing.

It is time for Akamai and Pando to acknowledge their shortcomings and start to live up to their claims of transparency and control. More importantly, game publishers need to be held accountable for how they choose to implement P2P software with their games. Several TorentFreak readers have named other offenders, including ijji’s Reactor, Square Enix’ Final Fantasy XIV, and THQ’s City of Heroes as examples of games that natively use P2P in a manner that lacks a display of respect for their players.

We truly applaud Akamai for taking the time to explain their side of the story to us, but to reach true fairness and transparency they (and others) will have to step it up a notch. Also, we advise individual employees not to suggest that we were paid for bringing this issue up in the comment section. Clearly we must have hit a sore spot, but that shouldn’t lead to more unfairness should it?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Although the use of P2P technology has many benefits, it is not always implemented with the interests of consumers in mind. In fact, quite often gamers are simply abused as cheap bandwidth sources by million dollar corporations, often without their knowledge.

Akamai, one of the largest content delivery companies around, has a P2P-based product called the Netsession Interface which is rather abusive towards customers. The software is installed as a Windows service and it is always running in the background. Even worse, most users wont even know that it’s running because it doesn’t show up in task manager. Nothing of the above The fact that it’s running continuously is not mentioned in their EULA.

The NetSession Interface is used by game publishers including Kuma Games, Aeria Games and NetDevil. Customers who play the games have no user controls or visible indicators, while the software uses ‘their’ upload bandwidth to deliver content to other users for an indefinite period after the download is completed.

Besides Akamai there are various other P2P-based solutions that lack transparency, control or privacy, such as Pando’s Media Booster. Blizzard’s BitTorrent Downloader which is used for the distribution of StarCraft 2 and World of Warcraft is one of the more transparent solutions, but that one is not perfect yet either.

From the Akamai example above it is clear that something has to be done to ensure that consumers are not exploited as bandwidth slaves. P2P technology is great, and many consumers would love to donate some, but there has to be a clear set of rules to guarantee that those consumers have a choice.

To address this issue, game publisher company Solid State Networks has just released a best practices document (pdf) which emphasizes giving users transparency and control over their resources. According to the company it all boils down to the following directives:

1. Transparency – Make visible and readily accessible information about the presence and operational activity of the P2P technology.

2. Control – Provide the ability to manage, operate and remove the P2P technology in an intuitive and conspicuous manner to the user.

3. Privacy – Ensure the absolute privacy and security of personal information and user originated files.

We think this is a great initiative and sincerely hope that the gaming industry will adopt this, or a similar set of rules, in the interests of the consumer. A quick search on Google shows that most of it is much needed, as there are are many complaints (1,2,3,4,5) from gamers about the lack of transparency and control that most of the current P2P delivery systems offer.

Surprisingly enough, Solid State Networks already offers their very own P2P-based delivery solution for game publishers that adheres to all three directives. However, the other P2P-based solutions that already exist out there can be easily adopted to become ‘fair’ as well.

Below you’ll find an additional PSA, summarizing how and why game publishers should handle P2P-powered game distribution.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.