The Pirate Bay is shutting down its tracker technology, its crew announced in a blog post that only accentuated the positive, in a move that follows a multiyear hailstorm of legal machinations, jail sentences thrown at founders, and constant public scrutiny. The positive spin in the blog post is reminiscent of the founders’ claims that their jail sentences represented “an epic win.”  But now that the site will switch to decentralized distributed hash table (DHT) technology for pointing to torrent sources, what is the likely impact on downloaders and freeloaders? They will have to turn to new alternatives, but those choices will take shape.

According to today’s blog post:

Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down!…By moving to a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), BitTorrent will become less vulnerable to downtime and outages.

Magnet links let users download torrents directly into BitTorrent clients, circumventing browsers. Through DHT technology, users seeking torrents access a dedicated DHT network, and find peers for the actual downloads. So, effectively, The Pirate Bay is seeking to avoid centralizing tracked torrents and services in such a way that it can stay free of legal problems.

Does that mean the end of widespread torrent downloading, including illegal downloads, though? Absolutely not. The Pirate Bay’s position as the leading purveyor of BitTorrent traffic is threatened, but torrenters will march on.

For one thing, TorrentFreak already spoke with Pirate Bay insiders who said that a decentralized model can work across many high-profile torrent sites:

We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT+PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally — like pick a date and all agree “from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore.”

The idea of a federated collection of BitTorrent trackers around the web has been raised before. Now that idea could shift to a federated trackerless collection of sites, with P2P-based torrenting becoming more widely distributed.

Let’s also keep in mind that the overall world of torrenting extends to many useful, legal sites providing content. NewTeeVee collected many of them here.  Legaltorrents, for example, distributes lots of Creative Commons-licensed content. Legal and illegal torrenting will continue as The Pirate Bay sends its tracker to Davey Jones’ locker, but today does mark an official end to a torrent tracking strategy that was central to The Pirate Bay’s ongoing notoriety.

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Posted by Sebastian Rupley on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  4 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay, torrents, tracker

Comcast has filed its appeal of an FCC decision issued last August that censured the cable company for blocking P2P files, arguing that the commission doesn’t have the authority to impose the broadband principles that define network neutrality in the U.S. absent a federal law or a full public hearing to make those principles binding as regulatory policy. Indeed, Comcast’s appeal will test the FCC’s ability to enforce network neutrality without either of those things.

Comcast’s intent to appeal the FCC’s ruling was announced last September, but initial briefs, which it filed July 27, are just now hitting the courts. Comcast initially got into trouble in October 2007, after an Associated Press investigation revealed the company was forging packets that would cause BitTorrent connections of some users to drop and failing to inform them of the practice — a serious net neutrality no-no.

After multiple hearings and the filing of more than 6,500 public comments, the FCC in August of 2008 gave Comcast a stern talking-to and ordered it to change its network management practice, but stopped short of issuing a fine. It also declined to make a formal rule regarding this sort of action, saying instead that it will continue to examine net neutrality issues on a case-by-case basis. So as per the FCC’s order, Comcast implemented a type of network management plan that temporarily slows connections for heavy bandwidth users when the network gets crowded. The management affects uploads and downloads and is protocol-agnostic. A Comcast spokeswoman said today that regardless of the success of Comcast’s appeal, its network management procedures will stay the same.

Comcast is seeking an appeal of the FCC decision based largely on its belief that the FCC’s order is unlawful. It argues that in an FCC proceeding, a law “must be either a statutory provision or an agency rule or precedent” and that the Internet Policy Statement adopted by the FCC in 2005 is neither, making it “unenforceable as a matter of law.” It goes on to allege that in censuring it, the FCC violated its own due process, essentially making up policies as it goes along, and that the commission has no authority to rule on this matter anyway because the subject falls far outside of its “statutorily mandated responsibilities.”

The FCC has until Sept. 21 to respond. Final documents must be in by Nov. 23, more than two years after the original AP report of BitTorrent throttling. Oral arguments likely won’t be scheduled until the spring of 2010. Justice, as always, moves slowly.

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Posted by Jordan Golson & Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  8 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, CMSCA, Comcast

The Internet is close to a meltdown, according to The Register. The culprit, according to author Richard Bennett, is the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, which introduced a new type of file transfer with its most recent alpha version. BitTorrent clients have long been using the TCP protocol to facilitate file transfers, but now uTorrent is moving to UDP, a protocol that is very popular for streaming media, VoIP and other real-time transfers. This will essentially lead to torrents eating up all of the bandwidth available for VoIP, according to Bennett, who calls uTorrent’s UDP transfers a “net-killing feature.”

Of course, the same argument was made when UDP-based VoIP connections and video streams became popular — and the Internet hasn’t ceased to exist. The truth is that uTorrent’s UDP implementation could actually be a step toward alleviating congestion problems. Bennett, however, decided to ignore this and instead serve up nothing more than a thinly veiled rant against net neutrality.

Bennett’s piece is based on a belief that UDP traffic is “aggressive” and uncontrollable, whereas TCP is the nice and proper protocol that can be easily managed. This notion ignores the basic fact that P2P developers, in order to make the protocol work at all, need to implement TCP-like functionalities on top of UDP, one of which includes congestion control. You simply can’t operate a P2P client that eats up all of its users’ bandwidth, much less build a successful business model on top of it.

BitTorrent Inc. has been working on establishing itself as a CDN solutions provider, offering media companies the ability to tap into its vast user base to deliver video and other huge files. Of course, this only works if end users are actually willing to provide some part of their upload bandwidth, and they are only willing to do so if file transfers don’t stop them from doing other things, like playing online games or making VoIP calls.

BitTorrent has traditionally entrusted its users with figuring out how to balance their network load, meaning that users had to manually limit their client’s maximum upload and download rate in case they encountered choppy Skype connections or similar problems.

uTorrent’s new implementation wants to automate this process by regulating its UDP traffic in relationship to ongoing TCP transfers. The company has tested its congestion control in recent months, and the first results seem encouraging, as a quote from a report (PDF) that the company recently shared with the IETF reveals:

“In one example, (BitTorrent) was used to download and seed game updates while an online multiplayer game was being played. With TCP used for transport the way it is usually used in BitTorrent, ping times shot up to 2000 milliseconds and beyond and stayed there while seeding. With the novel congestion control, ping times were in the 50-100 millisecond range, while the upload rate remained essentially unchanged.”

For now, we do have to take the company’s word for it that this actually works. uTorrent is not open source, and the client’s UDP file transfer protocol hasn’t been publicly specified, either. BitTorrent Inc. V-P Simon Morris has declared in a public response to the Register article that his company is working with the IETF to find “solutions that can be standardized and broadly adopted in due course.” In fact, BitTorrent engineer Stanislav Shalunov is co-chairing an IETF working group for this very purpose.

So why did Bennett chose to ignore all of this? Because a little scaremongering can go a long way to make the case for an ISP-based network management clampdown on P2P traffic. The only way to prevent the coming Internet meltdown, he contends, is to filter out uTorrent’s UDP transfers on the ISP level, and the only way to get this done is do away with net neutrality. Right — because if there’s one thing that we’ve learned from the financial sector, it’s that meltdowns are best prevented by doing away with regulation.

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Posted by Janko Roettgers on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  30 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, P2P, utorrent

PPLive, a Singapore Shanghai-based start-up that has a P2P video platform for distributing television in Asia has developed a way to accelerate and distribute Flash videos over peer-to-peer networks. The application called PPVA, sits in your task bar and when it detects a Flash video stream, it tries to find folks using the PPVA network who may have cached the same clip. This is good for solving the problems with very-popular files, since there is a likelihood that many more people would have watched the clip.

While this seems like a good idea, the guys at NewTeeVee who uncovered the story are being cautious, mostly because of the beta nature of PPVA. The other issue with this technology – it could make the video aggregators like YouTube crazy. Why? Because the first few seconds of the video are streamed from say YouTube and rest from the PPVA network. “This becomes an even bigger issue when advertisers start requesting more detailed statistics about online video usage,” NewTeeVee writes. Nevertheless, it could have some interesting implications for P2P CDN offerings.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  3 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, Online video, PPLive, PPVA, YouTube

Researchers at The University of Washington and Yale University will present a paper today on a developing Internet protocol that could lessen bandwidth demands from video and other large files. The peer-4-peer protocol is being touted by Pando Networks and a handful of ISPs as a way to solve some of the traffic problems caused by peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as BitTorrent.

Compressing or managing data more efficiently is becoming increasingly important, as providers attempt to clamp down on large amounts of traffic and as consumers and corporations demand ever more bandwidth-intensive applications.

Like P2P, the P4P protocol breaks files up into smaller packets, sends those around the Internet and then reassembles them at a destination, but P4P tracks the most efficient point in the networks from which to swap those files. This involves the ISPs handing over information about their network topology and knowing where a file swapper sits on the network. P4P makes it possible to know these things without exposing the data to either side. In tests with Verizon, Pando showed that by using P4P it could increase delivery speeds by up to 235 percent on U.S. cable networks and reduce intra-network traffic by 34 percent.

On their own, such protocols can help, but they won’t stave off the need to build out more network capacity or make existing protocols more efficient. However, as carriers cry uncle under the supposedly heavy loads that file-sharing and P2P services put on their networks, seeking tiered services, bandwidth caps and other practices to handle the bandwidth hogs, an industry-blessed protocol may be welcomed.

image courtesy of Pando Networks

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  11 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, Comcast, p4p, Pando Networks, Verizon

Update, Thursday 3 p.m. PST: BitTorrent confirms layoffs, but not everything else.

There are rumors that pink slips have been handed to some of the employees of San Francisco-based BitTorrent. The problems stem from their ill-fated consumer distribution effort, which competed with richer, more deep-pocketed rivals. They were trying to hawk the division to Best Buy for about $15 million, but the deal didn’t work out.

So far it’s all hearsay, but NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes is trying to get to the facts of the story. If true, then it would be yet another tumultuous twist in the life of this company, which at times has reminded me of a daytime soap. (Not that there’s anything wrong with daytime soaps.) And like daytime soaps, its popularity, especially with file-sharing folks, has remained consistent.

I think BitTorrent can save itself. Such popularity means it can become the infrastructure player that allows for the efficient distribution of big video files. Its BitTorrent Delivery Network Architecture can be put to good use, especially with partners. As noted in a post last year, BitTorrent has been working with a handful of set-top box makers such as Pace Micro, and is trying to embed its technologies into other devices. The funny thing is that even carriers want to work with them. All of this makes this company salvageable.

It’s all a matter of adopting a lower — almost invisible — profile, something startups find hard to do. BitTorrent is clearly dealing with bloated and untenable expectations set by megamillion-dollars in financing — roughly $29 million in two rounds — and the accompanying unrealistic valuations. It should have stayed focused on its core technology.

Open question: How would you fix BitTorrent?

Photo of BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen getting a shave at FoundRead launch event courtesy of Joey Wan via Flickr

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  11 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent

If the Internet is a highway, then the companies responsible for maintaining the roads are increasingly at odds with the ones producing a lot of the traffic. Comcast throttling BitTorrent traffic as a way to protect network integrity (or so it says) is one example. Another can be found in the arguments of a British ISP that’s seeking to get the BBC to pay for network upgrades, claiming the broadcaster’s iPlayer is hogging too much bandwidth.

I’m not going to get into the insanity happening in the UK right now, but what is worth talking about is how networks can handle the increasing amount of traffic going through their pipes. The request for funding to build more robust networks made by Simon Gunter, chief of strategy at ISP Tiscali, is akin to asking car companies to pay a tax for building more roads. It’s one way to address the issue, but there are other options, among them better traffic management, which would decrease the distance cars need to travel.

Now that I’ve thoroughly beaten that metaphor into the ground, let’s talk network management. It’s an evil phrase, but necessary in a world in which backhaul is limited and fiber to the home is still a luxury. Recall that the FCC had no problem with Comcast engaging in network management practices, but rather that Comcast “managed” a specific application without disclosing that fact to consumers. And the application attacked was competing with Comcast’s own cable offerings.

Many of these media files are delivered via peer-to-peer networks. They’ve long been the most efficient way to get large amounts of data across a network, and now they’re working hard to be even more efficient. Nine months ago, Verizon and Pando Networks stepped up to create the Peer 4 Peer working group, which is trying to create a standardized protocol through which P2P firms and ISPs could work together. The idea was that sharing an ISP’s network topology would help P2P companies route traffic in ways that are advantageous to both the ISP and the end user. Results included a 235 percent increase in delivery speeds in the U.S. and keeping more traffic inside an ISP’s own network.

The other way to reduce traffic involves each P2P company making tweaks to their software. In October of 2007, BitTorrent launched a function called BitTorrent DNA that recognizes when a network point is too congested and shunts the traffic flow through different areas. Jay Monahan, general counsel for Vuze, says his P2P company started paying more attention to congestion within the last few months as well.

At some point new roads will have to be built. But in the meantime, there are ways to prevent network congestion that don’t involve kicking certain cars off the road.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  12 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, Comcast, Pando Networks, Simon Gunter, Tiscali, Verizon, Vuze, VZ

Updated: BitTorrent Inc. and Comcast announced a new deal today, thanks to a helping hand provided by Comcast CTO and BitTorrent adviser, Tony Werner. It’s actually a bit of a non-deal and a way for Comcast to save face after its P2P traffic management gaffe. Chris Albrecht over on NewTeeVee sees this as a “let’s be friends” move. To me it seems more like the marriage of Michael Jackson to Elvis Presley’s daughter.

The press release basically says nothing and gives me a headache. How about using plain English, saying, “Sorry folks, we traffic managed and were heavy-handed about it, but we have learned our lesson and will be transparent in the future“? And it still fails to answer the question of why Comcast meddled with the traffic to begin with. If it was serious about P2P and leveraging it for smart distribution, it could have been proactive. This release is simply a reaction to what amounts to the company getting its hand caught in the proverbial cookie jar.

Furthermore, I have my doubts about the relevance of BitTorrent Inc. In the press release, President Ashwin Navin says:

In the spirit of openness and fostering innovative solutions, BitTorrent will take the first step in enhancing our client applications to optimize them for a new broadband network architecture. Furthermore, we will publish these optimizations in open forums and standard bodies for all application developers to benefit from.

How many people actually use BitTorrent’s client? Not many. In order for this partnership to have even a modicum of impact, Comcast needs to bring folks like Vuze and other P2P players into the fold. Otherwise, it’s nothing more than a press release full of spin.

Couple of interesting takes on this ever evolving story:

• Janko Roettgers: Bittorrent flip-flopping on net neutrality regulation.
• Aaron Huslage: Comcast Hijacks Bandwidth Management
• FCC Chariman Kevin Martin: I am concerned, though, that Comcast has not made clear when they will stop this discriminatory practice. It appears this practice will continue throughout the country until the end of the year and in some markets, even longer. While it may take time to implement its preferred new traffic management technique, it is not at all obvious why Comcast couldn’t stop its current practice of arbitrarily blocking its broadband customers from using certain applications. Comcast should provide its broadband customers as well as the Commission with a commitment of a date certain by when it will stop this practice.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  9 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, Comcast

The FCC has scheduled a second set of network management hearings to be held on the Stanford campus on April 17. A do-over of the hearings that were held last month at Harvard, perhaps? That gathering was driven, at least in part, by Comcast throttling BitTorrent traffic. The new hearings are also driven by Comcast, which paid folks to fill the lecture hall where the original hearings were held.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, cmcsa, Comcast, fcc, Stanford

• SAI: BitTorrent CEO: Rethinking Media Store, No Business Impact from Comcast
• CNet: Verizon Touts Smart P2P Technology
• ArsTechnica: $5 a Month for Legal P2P Could Happen Sooner Than you Think
• Broadband Reports: Comcast Sues FCC Over 30% Cap
• Reuters: U.S. Video Games Sales Jump 34% in Feb.
• The Globe and Mail: Quebecor Enters Race for Wireless Spectrum

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, Comcast, fcc, Quebecor, Verizon, VZ

NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes catches up with BitTorrent CEO Doug Walker and talks about the company, Comcast, traffic shaping and other sundry topics. Enjoy the video, and read Liz’s post over on NewTeeVee.

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Posted by Edit Staff on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, Doug Walker, GigaOmTV

BitTorrent, the San Francisco-based company that has long been looking for a new chief executive officer, has finally found one: Douglas Walker, former chief executive of Alias Systems. The company also added Eric Klinker, former chief technology of Internap (INAP), as its new CTO. These moves indicate that the P2P technology company is finally ready to shed its not-so-successful consumer efforts and instead focus on becoming an infrastructure-type player. It will compete with a growing number of similarly focused companies, including some still-in-stealth-mode startups

The company recently launched its BitTorrent Delivery Network Architecture (DNA) offerings. Klinker and his data center hosting credentials are a good indicator that BitTorrent is going to be beefing up its network delivery infrastructure. BitTorrent has been working with a handful of set-top box makers such as Pace Micro, and is trying to embed its technologies into other such IP set-top boxes. I think that after being a bit directionless for a while, BitTorrent is finally finding its bearings — though it is hard not to look at the competitive landscape and wonder if they can make money.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  9 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, P2P, Pace Micro