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Net Neutrality and BitTorrent - No More Throttling?

Posted by Zonk on from the my-wow-patch-is-feeling-sad dept.

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?'"

6 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Which portion? by 3p1ph4ny · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  2. Correct me if I'm wrong... by kailoran · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  3. Re:This may be a dumb question, but... by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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?

    --
    I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
    We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
  4. It's obvious by JoeWalsh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:This may be a dumb question, but... by Shakrai · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
    We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
  6. Value added by overshoot · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."