ISP-led Manipulation of Bittorent Traffic Now An International Concern

You’ve heard the saying. “There are two sides to every story.”

Such is the case with BitTorrent. A technology used by millions, both for legal and illegal purposes, it has been celebrated by a great many people – and has also been castigated by a great many authorities, from police forces to government bodies. (I’ll leave you to determine the difference between the two.) But are you aware of just how many parties in total there are around the world that have worked (and are most certainly still doing so) to stop peer-to-peer activities on the whole?

Not many are. Until this morning, until reading for myself an article published at the widely read TorrentFreak website, I too could claim to be fairly ignorant of the international reach of anti-torrent measures - most of which are (underhandedly) being led by ISPs, or Internet service providers.

While we have no reason to believe the attacks against - and the shaping of traffic away from – BitTorrent users is not happening in many places all across the world, for reasons concerning everything from suspected copyright infringement to censorship, there are three places, according to information gathered by TorrentFreak, where evidence of ISP-led manipulation of networks to the detriment of the BitTorrent technology is overwhelming: Canada, the UK, and, of course, the US and A. (Who could resist the option for a Borat reference?)

Let’s start with what’s going on inside the US. About a half dozen ISPs have been caught negatively messing with the flow of BitTorrent traffic so far: Comcast, Qwest, Atlantic Broadband, RCN/Starpower, Adelphia Cable Communications and Cablevision (the last of which provides service to millions of customers in the region in which I reside, the NYC Metropolitan area). What blocks have they been found to put on peer-to-peer activity? Well, some throttle, while some just prevent seeding (sharing, or uploading; not downloading) altogether. Whatever the tactic, it’s pretty conniving stuff, particularly as they don’t publicly disclose taking such actions.

As for stuff happening within the UK, there are a good number of ISPs doing some dirty work as well, including Pipex, BT Broadband, Freedom2Surf (Now with not-so-free freedom!), TalkTalk, and Virgin Media. All have been found to throttle traffic. None out-and-out block BitTorrent bits, naughty or not. But still, not cool.

Lastly, we have Canada. Rogers, the outstanding monopoly of technology services up in bear-and-salmon country, has been known to shape torrent-related traffic at will for a couple of years now, and now blocks all encrypted traffic, to the detriment of many services, not only those P2P-specific. Several other ISPs also work to take bandwidth away from BitTorrent users. They include: Shaw, Bell, Sympatico, Cogeco, Eastlink, and Explornet. (Cogeco joins Rogers in halting the activity of seeders entirely.)

So, in all, a fine bunch of corporations listed here, eh? Sterling. They’ve managed to do away with ethics almost entirely and have chosen to operate their services as they please. Unlimited data? Come on, be real. That’s just something to get you to sign up. Free access to anything on the Web? No. More like free access to anything they approve on the Web.

And you know what’s next on the list of things to be deemed off-limits. No more nakedness. Uh uh. They’re gonna get you nice and clean and regulated. For the benefit of the entire Internet community, of course.

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