Okay you tech-tastic media commies, the University of Washington has a solution for you. You know how sometimes it gets difficult when you’re trying to share a bit of music, video, whatever on a P2P site? Well the U-Dub guys have moved on from P2P to P4P, which may help with throttling.

According to New Scientist:

GROWTH in peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading has led some ISPs to limit, or "throttle", connection speeds to preserve bandwidth for everyone else. But the University of Washington in Seattle has hit on a promising alternative.

Bottlenecks occur most when people download P2P content that is stored a long way from their homes; internet links over thousands of kilometres get tied up delivering it. But the new scheme, called Proactive Provider Participation for P2P (or P4P), could ease the load. It involves ISPs supplying P2P sites with data on the shortest routes between peers, as well as network traffic reports that identify uncongested routes.

In tests, P4P cut the average trip of a P2P data packet from 1600 kilometres to just 250 km, reducing overall load by about 80 per cent, a Seattle conference on the internet heard last week.

Looks like stealing, I mean, sharing, stuff online is about to get way easier.