Broadband ISPs – Biting the torrent that feeds them

Flash back to 1998 or 1999, when most of us accessed the Interweb through telephone lines. AOL ruled the geography of the web as the king of dial-up. This was so because AOL was “good enough” for most of what the web had to offer at the time. Sure, visiting websites involved a ten to thirty second wait, but it was tolerable for most adults. E-mail suffered no huge lags unless attachments were being sent. Instant messaging was instant enough. Then, P2P emerged. This changed everything. Dial-up’s lack of speed shone through when Napster and its throng of successors made it possible to download entire songs or albums to one’s computer.

As P2P and other bandwidth-intensive innovations like streaming media became commonplace, dial-up went from mildly tolerable to a raw deal. Depending on size, the average song could take a full thirty minutes to download using a standard dial-up connection. The frustration stemming from these marathon waits ushered in an “Out with the old, in with the new” swing like never before seen. Broadband products offering turbocharged web access through cable modems and DSL lines became the Next Big Thing as kids thirsted for the newfound speed that could be had.

I need only to think back to when I was about sixteen or seventeen to remember it all taking place. I was one of the last kids in my circle of friends to be bound by AOL’s chains. Eager to bring the lightning-fast download speeds enjoyed by my friends in-house, I took matters into my own hands and conducted a cost/benefit analysis. I showed how our family was actually getting less utility for our Internet dollar using AOL as opposed to our local cable Internet provider and situated copies of my analysis in spots around the house occupied most frequently by my parents. After much nagging and haggling, broadband entered my household.

Ironically, it seems as though several of my friends engaged in similar fact-finding campaigns to spur their parents to upgrade. The driving force behind all of this, again, was the allure of popular content “on demand.”

Today, there’s little doubt about where the avalanche of broadband penetration has its genesis. The moth-to-flame flock of customers to higher-speed connections has supplied broadband Internet service providers with more revenue in a shorter period of time than would’ve been the case without P2P. This being the case, one would think that ISPs would bend over backwards to make their cash cow feel at home.

Instead, more and more are turning the guns on the very technologies that paved the way for their meteoric ascent. I see this trend most evident in how a growing number of ISPs are choosing to handle BitTorrent traffic.

Increasingly, BitTorrent traffic is being throttled, albeit under the politically correct misnomer “traffic shaping.” Rogers, a Canadian ISP, has been making waves on forums and other discussion avenues due to its shaping mechanisms. It’s been reported by many users that such innocuous acts as purchasing music on iTunes or subscribing to podcasts are no longer possible as a result of the aforementioned traffic shaping. The shaping technology sees that much of this content is delivered by more than one server and throttles it as though it were BitTorrent traffic.

Distresssed iTunes music store customers can be heard begging Apple to speak with Rogers on their behalf to clear these issues up. Does anyone else see a problem here? This isn’t an issue of an ISP fighting piracy or some other form of evil. BitTorrent is legitimate technology used to efficiently distribute licensed software, music, movies, and games every day of the week.

I’m about as vocal a big-business advocate as you’ll find. I believe whole-heartedly in laissez-faire capitalism and the sanctity of honest profit-seeking, but this is fraud. Broadband providers’ bread and butter is promising the speed and bandwidth required by popular applications. Commercials for a major broadband provider in my area depict frustrated dial-up users lamenting about the glacial pace of their web connections. Numerous studies have attributed the bulk of broadband penetration in the last five years to P2P and it’s unquestionably the reason that these companies have such a high subscriber base.

Why, then, do they find it acceptable to serreptitiously downgrade the functionality that earned these customers? To my knowledge, no public announcement was made by Rogers. Customers were made to learn of their neutered service on their own. Also, why target BitTorrent? I spoke with a support engineer from a widely used ISP in my area and he said that BitTorrent is despised by cable ISPs due to its heavy reliance on upstream bandwidth, which is more expensive. Fine. So why not just limit obscenely high transfers and leave the rest alone?

BitTorrent is possibly the most efficient means of file distribution there is. Of all the P2P transfer mechanisms that exist, BitTorrent clients make the least effort to conceal the identities of individuals swapping copyrighted wares. In all, this amounts to ISPs trying to have their cake and eat it too. If your network is incurring significant costs as a result of BitTorrent and action is necessary, fine. Disclose it! Advertising your services as the path to that which you cannot or will not actually provide is wrong, period.

In response, I propose that Zeropaid or a similar P2P-flavored portal launches a platform where ISPs hostile to BitTorrent traffic can be named and user experiences discussed. Severed access to legitimate services like iTunes should be examined and confirmed.

Much of the conversation currently exists on disparate forums and message boards. Instead, it should be aggregated in a common space so the outrage can be more visibly quantified. If ISPs wont be forthcoming about how they handle BitTorrent or even call throttling by its name, someone else has to.

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