Does network neutrality mean an end to BitTorrent throttling?

Now that BitTorrent is all grown up and has been given the keys to its parents’ car, ISPs are faced with the difficult decision about how to handle the protocol. Companies from around the world have been throttling the service, which can sometimes eat up three-quarters of a provider’s total bandwidth. Throttling could be seen as a legitimate response to this bandwidth crunch if all BitTorrent content were illegal, but of course, it’s not. So what’s an ISP to do—especially if they have agreed to run a neutral network?

BitTorrent has always had its legal uses—one popular application is distributing Linux ISOs—but legal uses of the software have become increasingly common over the last year. BitTorrent (the company) has announced its own plans to go legit, offering DRMed Hollywood movies from major studios. The company has already raised almost $9 million in venture capital and has signed deals with several of the major studios. Its service should launch sometime in February.

Or consider Zudeo, the BitTorrent-based service from Azureus, which is trying to do much the same thing, but in high-definition. It is also poised to send massive amounts of traffic through the ‘Net, but ISPs won’t be able to tell simply by looking at a packet whether it’s legitimate or not.

The protocol has become popular enough that Opera has built-in support for BitTorrent downloads, and Blizzard’s own World of Warcraft update program is built on open-source BitTorrent technology.

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