Faced with a surge in network usage, Internet service providers are grumbling about rising traffic levels. The increase is driven so far mostly by Internet video from YouTube and similar services, which don"t actually employ P2P Technologies.

But ISPs say the looming growth of true peer-to-peer applications threatens to overwhelm them. Some ISPs have even started sniffing out P2P traffic on their networks and curbing it, either slowing file sharing to a trickle or bringing it to a halt.