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Now BTJunkie shuts down: Who needs SOPA?

Bobbie Johnson — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:34:10 +0000

In the weeks after Internet users and some of the web’s biggest companies rallied around to fight SOPA’s approach to curbing online piracy, filesharing services of all stripes have taken a thrashing. First Megaupload was shut down and its flamboyant owner charged, then the Swedish courts ruled that the founders of the Pirate Bay could not appeal jail sentences handed down in 2009.

Now BTJunkie, another of the world’s largest filesharing sites, seems to have bitten the dust.

The site — a torrent search engine which seems to have been based in Europe — has been running for the past seven years, and at one point boasted at least 80 million users. But over the weekend its pages were replaced by a single blue screen marking its lifespan and a simple message:

“This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!”

Although not as well known as some others, BTJunkie was one of the world’s most active torrent search engines, linking to millions of active torrents. That catalog which made it a big deal: in fact, according to data from Compete, it was the 3rd largest site of its kind in 2011.

But unlike Megaupload, which only shut when the police raided the company’s HQ, this closure seems to be proactive on the part of the BTJunkie’s owners. The site was never the target of any direct legal action, but it has been in the crosshairs of entertainment industry for some time: searches for the site are generally blocked by Google, and it became a thorn in the side of the MPAA when a BTJunkie admin was the first to spot that the MPAA was uploading fake torrents back in 2007.

It appears that mounting pressure from recent events has finally broken the resolve of the site’s anonymous owners, with Torrentfreak claiming that one of the site’s owners said the stress and trouble wasn’t worth the effort:

Talking to TorrentFreak, BTjunkie’s founder said that the legal actions against other file-sharing sites such as MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay played an important role in making the difficult decision. Witnessing all the trouble colleagues got into was cause for a lot of worry and stress, and those will now belong to the past.
That said, BTjunkie’s owner still thinks there might be a future for other BitTorrent sites.
“I really do hope so, the war is far from over for sure,” he told TorrentFreak.

That certainly makes this move closer to recent changes by The Pirate Bay, which closed down its .org domain in order to prevent seizure by the American authorities, than a move caused by a direct threat.

In the short term this will certainly be seen as a victory for the content lobby, though in a way it really proves that they don’t necessarily need more legislation to get what they want. But will it make a significant difference to the amount of filesharing in the long term? That seems less straightforward.

It’s unlikely that BTJunkie’s users will simply disappear or stop torrenting: they’ll just move off to other services, or start replacements that take the process back towards square one. But however you spin it, this could be an important moment in the arguments about whether the carrot of better service provision is more effective than the stick of legal threat.

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Pirate Bay considers European courts after Swedish ruling

Bobbie Johnson — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:33:38 +0000

One of Pirate Bay founders convicted of aiding copyright infringement said the group is considering taking its case to the European court, after Sweden’s top judges refused to hear their appeal against a guilty verdict handed down in 2009.

In a ruling on Wednesday, the court said it would not grant the right to appeal to Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström, three of those convicted in 2009 — effectively cementing their jail sentences and a SEK 47 million ($7 million) fine. Another one of the site’s founders, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, had already lost the right to appeal after missing a hearing due to illness. All four have since moved abroad.

But Sunde, who now runs the online payments service Flattr but faces an eight month jail sentence and multimillion dollar fine, told me that the group would “probably” take their case to Europe — although other options were still available.

In addition, in a post on his blog, he said that the Pirate Bay had broken “the monopoly of information”, accused the Swedish legal system of corruption, railed against the entertainment industry, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and drew parallels with Wikileaks.

TPB has been one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship. All of the people involved in TPB at some time have been involved in everything from famous leaks projects to aiding people in the arab spring. We’ve fought corruption all over the world. We’ve promoted equal opportunities to poor nations around the globe.

The ethical argument will rage on, particularly in the wake of controversial legislation such as SOPA and ACTA.

But in the meantime, the organization appears to be taking defensive measures and the main Pirate Bay site appears to have been taken down. It is currently redirecting to a Swedish mirror, thepiratebay.se, in what Torrentfreak reports is an attempt to prevent domain seizure by US authorities — as was seen recently with the shutdown of Megaupload

A lawyer for Lundström, a pharmaceuticals millionaire with ties to extremist groups who had helped fund the Pirate Bay in its early days, told Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter that the decision was “absurd” and that the technical legality of torrent services still had to be examined closely.

“I am disappointed that the court is so uninterested to dissect and analyze the legal twists and turns of one of the world’s most high-profile legal cases of all time,” Per Samuelsson told DG.

However the case proceeds, it seems that the Swedish court’s decision could spark further action against other sites, according to the country’s Anti-Piracy Bureau.Stockholm’s Aftonbladet newspaper said the APB is preparing “a new offensive against filesharers”.

The highest court has made it clear that anyone who takes any part in these crimes, even those who supply the internet connection, will have to face up to their responsibility,” said Henrik Pontén, legal counsel for Sweden’s Anti-Piracy Bureau

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Infographic: Music, movie & book biz bigger than ever

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:30:33 +0000

Is piracy really destroying the entertainment industry? Techdirt blogger Mike Masnick doesn’t think so, and he has some numbers to prove it. Masnick and his Floor64 colleague Michael Ho released a report titled “The Sky Is Rising” at the Midem music industry convention in Cannes Monday that shows how the global entertainment industry actually grew by 50 percent in the last decate, despite Napster, BitTorrent & Co.

The report was commissioned by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which counts companies like Google and Facebook as its members. It’s definitely worth a read (check out the full PDF) and will likely provoke discussion, especially in light of the entertainment industry’s ongoing push for tougher copyright laws. For a CliffsNotes-like version, check out the following infographic:

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Follow the traffic: What MegaUpload’s downfall did to the web

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:32:01 +0000

MegaUpload, the file-sharing community, has had its physical offices raided by the FBI and its site shut down (although it may be back up) because the U.S. government says it has violated copyright. While others detail what services to use now or who was actually using the service for non-nefarious (piracy) purposes, we were wondering what it meant for the web when a large content sharing site is suddenly taken offline. I asked a few companies that track that sort of thing to see what has happened to Internet traffic over the last 24 hours.

Arbor Networks said it saw traffic begin to drop fairly sharply in Europe after about 7 p.m. GMT and 2 p.m. EST, when the site was estimated to have been shut down on Thursday. I’ve asked if it also saw a spike in other types of traffic, such as peer-to-peer traffic that might indicate that burned MegaUploaders were turning to BitTorrent, but a spokeswoman said so far, Arbor hadn’t seen anything like that.

Meanwhile, Sandvine has released data showing MegaUpload was indeed one of the more popular sites on the web for storing and sharing content. It ranked as .98 percent of the total web traffic in the U.S. and 11.39 of the total web traffic in Brazil. It garnered 1.95 percent of the traffic in Asia-Pacific and a less substantial .86 percent in Europe. The chart below shows how it ranked among other services of similar ilk:

Sandvine also showed the abrupt fall-off in its traffic after the raid:

We’ll update this story if more companies report back.

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BitTorrent takes on Dropbox with personal file sharing

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:00:56 +0000

BitTorrent Inc. launched a personal file sharing application called Share Thursday that aims to give users an alternative to paid cloud storage companies and media sharing over social networks. Share makes it possible to transfer files without any size limits to an unlimited number of personal contacts. Files are cached in the cloud, so users don’t have to be online at the same time to complete transfers.

On Wednesday, BitTorrent Chief Strategist Shahi Ghanem told me the company is relying on Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services to provide this kind of caching infrastructure. Files are taken off the cloud as soon as they are sufficiently shared by peers. The app will initially be Windows-only, but Mac users will be able to download an alpha version of the company’s µTorrent client that will offer them the same kind of personal file sharing functionality. Future Windows versions of µTorrent will also offer Share functionality.

BitTorrent's new Share app.

BitTorrent isn’t the first company to try to combine P2P and personal media sharing. Companies like Pando have long offered personal file transfers, but typically limit the size of files that can be transferred to manage hosting costs. Others like Podmailing were more aggressive, but eventually had to shut down due to exploding hosting costs.

Ghanem told me BitTorrent plans to avoid this kind of fate by building out its own P2P-powered personal cloud storage system. The system isn’t up and running yet, but the idea is that users will receive free storage for their files by sharing some hard drive space and bandwidth with other users.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Carlos Maya.

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Pirate Bay's Tracker Shutdown Won't Snuff Torrents

Sebastian Rupley — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:35:49 +0000

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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Comcast Lawsuit Questions FCC Right to Enforce Net Neutrality

Jordan Golson & Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:33:52 +0000

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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BitTorrent at War With VoIP? Hardly

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:16:17 +0000

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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Startup Marries Flash Video with P2P

Om Malik — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 14:55:46 +0000

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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Can P4P Solve Bandwidth Bloat?

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:01:56 +0000

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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Open Thread: How to Fix BitTorrent, the Startup?

Om Malik — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:00:45 +0000

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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Does the Internet Need More Roads or Better Traffic Signals?

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:00:33 +0000

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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SPIN CITY: Comcast, BitTorrent Non-Deal

Om Malik — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:48:11 +0000

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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FCC Tries Again on Network Managment

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:55:14 +0000

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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March 14, 2008: P2P and Suits and Sales! Oh My!

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:37:26 +0000

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Interview: BitTorrent CEO Doug Walker

Edit Staff — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:15:53 +0000

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.

http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fnewteevee%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F735776&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf

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