Comments on: BitTorrent/Comcast Cat-and-Mouse Game Continues

By: bugmenot

bugmenot — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:45 +0000

Red herring but I’ll bite: Off the top of my head Vuze and Bittorrent Inc (the company) sell Hollywood-authorized content and World-of-Warcraft distributes its patches via Bittorrent. Of course you will decree that these don’t meet whatever standards you have.

But again, it’s irrelevant: A protocol doesn’t need be used by major industries to be justified.

By: Mike Nelson

Mike Nelson — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:40:16 +0000

Aside from the question of traffic shaping measures and countermeasures, the proponents of P2P claim there are legitimate sellers of content that use P2P. I would invite them to name any major seller of video or music (Netflix, Blockbuster, Hollywood, iTunes?) that would ask its customers to use P2P rather than simply download the content from servers controlled by the seller.

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:15:33 +0000

It’s not clear how upset the FCC is about Comcast. They’ve only announced hearings on the subject, which are not going to go well for the Coalition of Clueless Consumer Advocates who’ve made complaints, in my estimation. The lack of empirical data will bite the CCCA in the ass.

But back to your previous point, I think it should be fairly easy to distinguish accounts running VPN from those running obfuscated BT, the trouble will come from those who run both. The ISP will have to screw them over and then explain why.

The better approach for BT is to adopt the P4P recommendations, BTW, but they’re not pirate-friendly.

By: bugmenot

bugmenot — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:01:47 +0000

But I would suspect that users who run BitTorrent seeders and VPNs at the same time will have all their traffic demoted.

There is still the issue of whether P2P traffic will be is demoted as much as it would have been otherwise. But I think the issue is less cut and dried for the ISPs than you make it out to be. First, it becomes very complicated to try to explain to the layman why their VPN traffic is being demoted by the ISP. Trying to explain the relationship between the apparently unrelated VPN and Bittorrent protocols is going to be futile. Worse still will be trying to convince a customer that their VPN is slow because of something that their kid is doing or because some new service they are using happens to use Bittorrent to distribute files (Online video purchases, online gaming patch distribution): “No it was working fine for the past 3 years, what did you (ISP) do?”, “No, my router tells me I have plenty of bandwidth. I read in the newspaper that you are screwing up my VPN”, “I don’t have Bittorrent”, etc.

Second, if Comcast’s RSTs to Bittorrent — a protocol relatively few people even know about — raised the ire of the FCC what do the ISPs think will happen for a work-related protocol like VPN?

I guess we will see how this plays out.

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:02:27 +0000

I don’t think it’s too hard to tell the difference between conventional uses of VPN and BitTorrent swarms, simply counting the connections gets you there. But I would suspect that users who run BitTorrent seeders and VPNs at the same time will have all their traffic demoted. That’s what I would do if I were in charge, at any rate.