Net Neutrality and BitTorrent - No More Throttling?

Umaga's Purse writes "Will ISPs still be able to throttle BitTorrent traffic now that a significant proportion of it is legit? It's a tough question, especially for ISPs like AT&T (which agreed to run a neutral network in order to gain approval for its merger with BellSouth from the FCC). It's not just a problem for AT&T, though: 'ISPs that have made no such agreements may not need to worry about BitTorrent taking over their networks, but they do need to wrestle with the issue of how to handle it now that so many legal uses of the protocol are available. Do they want to irritate their BitTorrent-using contingent, or let BitTorrent flow unhindered at the risk degrading the experience of those who don't download torrents?'"

Comments

Which portion?

[3p1ph4ny]

Will ISPs still be able to throttle BitTorrent traffic now that a significant proportion of it is legit?

Says who? Not that I disagree, but it would be interesting to read a study done on the matter...

Correct me if I'm wrong...

[kailoran]

...but I thought that net neutrality didn't make QoS illegal

Re:This may be a dumb question, but...

[Shakrai]

...how does an ISP recognize BitTorrent traffic? As far as I can tell, it's really easy to change the port numbers used by the BitTorrent tracker and by the end user. I now that my uTorrent client is set to randomize a port and then use uPnP to ask my router to open it.

More to the point, I can set my BitTorrent client (Azureus) to encrypt all traffic. Currently I have it set to default to encryption and fallback to plaintext -- but it would be a simple matter to reject unencrypted connections.

Throttling traffic is stupid. Build your network to support the load or stop selling "unlimited" service. My cell phone provider doesn't get to decide who I can talk or what I can talk about. Why should my ISP?

It's obvious

[JoeWalsh]

Throttle back some protocol that only a few of their customers have even heard of, or keep the average user from having a good experience. Hmm. Tough choice.

Most users don't download torrents.

The easy solution:

[Smidge204]

Stop overselling your infrastructure by such ridiculous margins.

Maybe if you could actually deliver what you charge for (or only charge for what you can deliver), people wouldn't get so easily pissed about "degraded" service.
=Smidge=

Re:This may be a dumb question, but...

[drinkypoo]

That said, the point I wanted to make was that perhaps the problem lies in selling as "unlimited" a finite resource. In the end it shouldn't matter if I use 100GB of bittorrent or 100GB of VPN to my office. If they don't have the capacity to be selling it as unlimited then perhaps they shouldn't be selling it as unlimited.

Amen to that. In fact NO provider in the US will give you unlimited of anything but dialup and that only because it's too slow to be an issue and they don't even run the modem banks any more, they pay someone to send their users to the right places.

Comcast cable limits you to 90GB (through human intervention, not automatically.) Hughesnet satellite limits you to 350MB/4 hours. Et cetera.

Oh AND, your cellphone provider WILL terminate your service if you roam too often, which makes you unprofitable. So you're wrong about that anyway.

Re:This may be a dumb question, but...

[Shakrai]

went out the window well over 5 years ago when modern packet shapers came to the market which were able to analyze the very contents of packets and classify them based on the type of service they contained rather than the port they used.

Hence why my bittorrent client supports encryption. My two cents says that it's none of my ISPs business what my packets contain. It may be their business how much bandwidth I use -- but it shouldn't matter if that bandwidth is VoIP, bittorrent, HTTP or a VPN. 100GB is 100GB regardless of what protocol generated the traffic.

Value added

[overshoot]

Or (just a notion here) -- they could cache Torrent traffic and speed up the traffic for their customers while reducing their external traffic load.

All without doing anything squinky: just identify which torrents are hot, add one of their own. It's what BitTorrent does, after all.

Here's an idea

[Jtheletter]

How about before the ISPs even think of throttling down BitTorrent or any other type of traffic - they make even a casual effort to throttle back the 95% of email that is spam? If bandwidth is so precious that they need to consider slowing down one kind of traffic, why not start with the kind that is known to be illegitimate. Considering all the BS that is crammed into EULAs these days I think it would be actually reasonable to include a clause that says if your PC gets hijacked and zombied and is spewing garbage then we're going to cut you off until you fix it. The ISPs can certainly implement some algorithms to detect likely zombied computers, cut them off and redirect them to a page explaining the situation and common tools/resources to help fix their boxes, then the user clicks some link to get their connection reevaluated to regain net access. I'm in favor of net neutrality and no traffic throttling but I think the hypocracy of these ISPs should also be addressed. If half the money spent lobbying for net neutrality were spent tracking down spammers and helping users to identify and fix trojaned PCs then spam would be on the decline, not doubling every 3 months. Or here's an idea, how about using some of the no-doubt tens of millions of dollars that's about to be spent to change all the Cingular signs back to AT&T signs on fighting spam and botnets? But no, better to let the problem fester and the spammers grow richer and better armed (digitally) than let the company logos go un-revamped. Farking rediculous. [/rant]