Topic Proposal: Cost of Video Downloads

Entire movies and television shows can be downloaded through several means both legal and illegal. Legally, sites such as Netflix and Hulu allow internet users to purchas digital copies of movies and TV shows respectively. Illegally, there are several torrent sites that make downloading media copies to personal computers possible. Regardless of the source of these videos, this exchange of data is occurring and at ever greater rates. The concern is that this massive amount of data being uploaded and downloaded is slowing the internet collectively and users speeds individually. As a result internet service providers have throttled bandwidth to these torrent sites but the legal means of downloads transfer equally large amounts of data and slow effectively clog internet traffic. Thus ISPs have to spend increasingly to upgrade just to maintain their quality of service. This in turn leads to increased prices paid by end users for the same internet service.