If you can’t beat them, join them! Verizon Communications Inc. has been working with researchers at Yale University on new ways to enhance the peer-to-peer opportunity through faster downloads and lower costs for the ISPs. That of course doesn’t mean Verizon encourages illegal traffic of files, instead, the company said they wanted to help users share files faster, and by that they probably meant legal ones.

The tests conducted by them will be presented at the Distributed Computing Industry Association’s P2P conference in New York on Friday by the association’s P4P division. “This test signifies a turning point in the history of peer-to-peer technology and ISPs,” said Robert Levitan, chief executive of P2P developer Pando Networks, the Associated Press reports.

What Verizon is trying to do in fact is minimize costs for file sharing and increase share speed by using the P4P protocol so that peers will not be selected randomly anymore, from all the corners of the world, but according to their position: the closer, the better. This will not only reduce costs for ISPs, who will get rid of those nasty, long-distance connections, but it will also increase performance, as the transfer rate could even double in performance.

Verizon is aware of how P2P thrived in the past years, especially for illegal file sharing, but the company announced it plans on dealing with legit companies only, such as Pando Networks. The new P4P protocol is expected to be in use as early as next month.

“The Internet is quickly transforming into a media distribution platform, and there are people who say: “It will break. It’s not built to move music and movies and games and software,” Levitan said according to the same source. “New technologies are needed, and this is one of those technologies,” he added.