Everyone has heard the saying “There are two
sides to every story” and this is so true of many things.
A
prime example is BitTorrent, a technology used by millions of people,
all around the world, for both legal and illegal purposes.
It
has been celebrated by a great many people, but
also 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?
ISPs Leading The Attacks
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.
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?)
In The USA
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.
In The UK
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.
And Canada
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.)
Conclusions
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.
Paul Glazowski is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com
