Right now we have a common architecture where users upload files to a central service, and that central service then forwards the content to other users. This is true of services like Youtube, Zoom, etc. With 1Tb/s content creators could serve the content from their own network. This would allow for platforms that have much lower operating costs, and could offer much more generous revenue share. Perhaps a peer-to-peer agreement could occur, where different nodes in the network will cache and reserve each other's files to respond to highly viral content.
I would also disagree with the thesis that internet speeds in the US have stagnated. In 2014 I had about 80Mbps. Today I have about 1500Mbps. On west coast cities I see high end condos with access to speeds up to 7000Mbps. Even my friends in pretty rural locations in 'fly over' states have access to hundreds of mbps with the latest federal grants to build fiber in rural areas. In one case I know someone that skipped from 52k to 200mbps fiber, with cable internet never offered to his house.
> With 1Tb/s content creators could serve the content from their own network. This would allow for platforms that have much lower operating costs, and could offer much more generous revenue share.
We have PeerTube now, which does that. Works fine. Nobody uses it, because there's little "discovery". The centralization of YouTube allows people to find your cat video.
Centralization isn' a matter of pipe bandwidth alone but of other things - fault tolerance, replication, professional sysadmins, logging.... Not sure how easy it would be to reproduce all those in a distributed system.
I would also disagree with the thesis that internet speeds in the US have stagnated. In 2014 I had about 80Mbps. Today I have about 1500Mbps. On west coast cities I see high end condos with access to speeds up to 7000Mbps. Even my friends in pretty rural locations in 'fly over' states have access to hundreds of mbps with the latest federal grants to build fiber in rural areas. In one case I know someone that skipped from 52k to 200mbps fiber, with cable internet never offered to his house.