Media Wonk

Is blocking good for BitTorrent? - March 14, 2008

Silicon Alley Insider has an interesting Q&A up today with BitTorrent CEO Doug Walker. Two points jump out: 1) BitTorrent can encrypt traffic using its commercial BitTorrent DNA service so that it's undetectable to ISPs, and therefore immune to the type of Torrent-blocking "network management" techniques applied by Comcast; and 2) as far as BitTorrent can tell, Comcast's blocking of open-source Torrent traffic is pretty minimal anyway.

On the first point, Walker said, "The 'DNA' service is a commercial service that's undetectable by Comcast. We're able to encrypt it such that we can to protect our customers' interests. Having said that, Tony Werner, who's the CTO of Comcast, is on our advisory board. So we're working with Comcast not only to help them understand how we're going to present ourselves to the marketplace but also to offer them technological solutions to some of their problems."

So who's getting whacked by Comcast? "Who it's really affecting are the BitTorrent open source clients," Walker said, which are not part of the commercial DNA service.

In other words, relying on the open-source BitTorrent protocol to deliver licensed content (Vuze) could leave you vulnerable to "network management" practices, while signing up for BitTorrent's commercial service won't.

As to the second point, "it really does look like it's a very small amount of traffic that Comcast is blocking," Walker told SAI. "And they do it when a certain neighborhood reaches a certain point of saturation."

Comcast's packet-forging tactics may be unacceptable on principle, and perhaps illegal. But that's not the same thing as a systematic effort to impede BitTorrent traffic for competitive reasons, as Comcast's critics have alleged.

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