BitTorrent Stands Up for Net Neutrality
Written by Ernesto on August 01, 2009In a late submission to the Canadian network management hearings of the CRTC, BitTorrent Inc. debunked some P2P myths and asked the committee to decide in favor of a neutral net. ISPs should look for other methods to deal with network congestion rather than discriminating against BitTorrent users, they say.
Ignited by the Comcast fiasco in the US, the concept of net neutrality has been brought into the mainstream. ISPs are rarely transparent when it comes to their throttling, capping and other interfering behaviors, but in Canada they had to come clean due to a CRTC investigation.
The Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is currently looking into the traffic management practices of Canadian ISPs. Several hearings were held to examine the Internet traffic management practices being used, and check that they are in accordance with the Telecommunications Act.
Although not invited to the hearings itself, BitTorrent Inc. filed a late submission (pdf) to the CRTC this week, standing up for Net Neutrality.
“The hearings have clearly exposed some highly discriminatory traffic management targeting the BitTorrent protocol, which is no surprise to our users in Canada,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak. “We really hope the regulators will act in the interests of citizens, innovation and free speech, rather than in the narrow interests of monopolies,” he added.
Last year, the company was also actively involved in FCC’s investigation into Comcast’s BitTorrent traffic shaping. Not only are such network management practices a direct threat to BitTorrent’s business model, it also hurts individual users and other businesses.
“Economically, P2P enables a very cost effective means to reach an audience. Fewer computers to buy or provision means that media distribution is no longer the domain of those with deep pockets. P2P allows small Canadian companies, as well as individuals, to distribute their works through the Internet to a global audience at relatively little cost,” BitTorrent writes in its filing to the CRTC.
One other group of victims are independent artists, who publish their work on BitTorrent in increasing numbers. In the hearings the CRTC was already told that blocking or restricting BitTorrent traffic could mean that independent filmmakers are unable to publish their work.
But large companies are in the same boat. “P2P is not just the domain of the independent artists, even major media companies are coming to the realization that P2P technology provides a faster, more efficient, more reliable way to distribute mass media,” BitTorrent writes.
In their filing BitTorrent Inc. mentions CNN’s P2P powered stream of Obama’s inauguration as one example how P2P can benefit large companies. Canadian public TV broadcaster CBC also got a mention, as they used Mininova’s services to distribute
If ISPs have to manage their networks, they shouldn’t target any specific applications or transfer protocols. Discriminating against BitTorrent would hamper innovation and potentially impair freedom of expression, the company told the CRTC.
Previously: isoHunt Loses Appeal in Preemptive Strike Against CRIA
Next: Hackers Whack Music Industry For Punishing Pirate
45 Responses
It’s about time something like is done. Throttling has become rediculous to a point of having unlimited bandwidth worthless.
I just hope we won’t end up with having the throttling lifted only to have something else, equally stupid, take it’s place.
I still don’t think that they’ll start giving a rats ass about illegal throttling.
Although, it’s still a nice/smart move from BitTorrent Inc.
hope this helps
It probably will but if it doesn’t happen I sure hope the government will either take control over those ISPs or crack down on them if they find any illegal activities to hamper P2P.
Nice. I read the whole report, which i think is extremely well and professionally written. A far cry from TPB’s pulp lit submissions to the courts, this maturely states why neutrality is important, and not just because Canadians want to pirate shit faster. Having tried all the main canadian isp’s, and been thoroughly dismayed by all, this gives me some tentative hope that something might be done to disrupt the extortionate racket that is going on, enabled by the ignorance of most users. Way to go BitTorrent!
I don’t think its’ fair that bittorrent users get throttled just because someone MIGHT be downloading a movie, there are plenty of legal uses for bittorrent and P2P, just because it’s notorious for being used to illegally download movies, music and games doesn’t mean that someone’s not using it to get things legally, they distrubute plenty of legal software on them too.
@6
Yeah, it would be like people stop making pencils, ’cause someone might/can/will stab someone in the eye with a pencil. It’s idiotic behavior at its worst.
wow, is it just my computer, or are people posting from the future?
ah! i’m from the future too!
I work with some people on a semi-popular piece of software. To save bandwidth and speed up downloads we looked into bittorrent to distribute updates, but due to behaviors like this, it would be too much of a hastle to do. A shame, because it would have cut time to update in half.
In other words, canada has upheld what pirates love : a complete lack of accountability for peoples actions on the internet. And there I was thinking that bittorrent stood for legitimacy. “Net neutrality” is just a deceptively simple word for people being to run from the law.
Canada have played right into the hands of thieves. Although, given the fact that their abysmal attitude towards copyright has been made well clear, this is hardly a surprise.
so is comcast still interfering P2P..?
@7
except most all of us are “stabbing each other in the eyes” and they know it. If they want to throttle my upload to 150 kbps, I say meh.
Though it would be nice to upload in mbps from home.
@11
yet more meaningless bullshit from neocock.
wtf? did my isp block demonoid.com? or is the site down?
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
Not just you.
Wow, BitTorrent totally ROCKS once again!
RT
http://www.anon-web-tools.us.tc
No matter how much you tell them… They wont listen, they still believe that p2p = evil
I applaud BitTorrent Inc. for standing up for Canadian rights. I read over the submission and they said a lot of what needed saying.
I actually think bittorents submission plays into the hands of those who support throttling.
“Economically, P2P enables a very cost effective means to reach an audience. ”
That’s exactly what the ISP’s are saying though, it takes the cost from the media and gives it to the ISP. Without proper agreements for management it costs the ISP money which is where we are at today.
I read the CBC news on the CRTC, America’s FCC equivalent. The comments were best.
Nearly every user agree that:
ISP’s oversell their bandwidth expecting you to use 5% of what you are paying for.
Canada pays waaay more for Internet service then Japan or Korea and they get fiber to the home! (Canada COULD have to most major cities /w upgrading at shared cost from tax payers/ISP’s, even tho they spent their upgrade money already)
Bell was worst service for throttling, also caught on throttling service of wholesalers. Here sell your own internet UNDER us to pretend we are not a monopoly….lmfao.
Hopefully the envy gets at the good Canadian people. We want what Japan already has! Truly the land of unlimited Internet!
Once you tube starts clogging up or video doesn’t go fast enough people will bitch more and service shall improve.
Neo, “Canada have played right into the hands of thieves. Although, given the fact that their abysmal attitude towards copyright has been made well clear, this is hardly a surprise.”….ya stay out of Canada /w yer bribes and greed…
Canada aren’t thieves. Don’t assume that copying a song = theft. It in fact = 2 songs. You can keep your copy, it’s prob full of drm not valuable to the customer anyways.
I’ll download the ripped one w/o drm instead and then send the money directly to the artist instead of 10 cents on each dollar for your “representation”.
Yeah, but… subscribers PAY for that bandwidth. Their contracts with the ISPs specify limits on packages, and if the ISP has set inappropriate limits then it’s the ISP at fault if it finds itself unable to support the demand. In this case the ISP should recalculate its costs and adjust prices/packages accordingly.
And none of this is specific to any particular protocol, so why single out BitTorrent/P2P? I think it’s interesting to note Bell launched their own media delivery service not long after throttling the P2P protocols. So tell me, how is one not to consider that as a rather suspicious move, as one quite possibly designed specifically to suppress the competition? Hell, they even throttled all the 3rd-party ISPs that purchase capacity through them! If they really had problems with bandwidth capacity then simply set realistic bandwidth limits, and charge realistic prices.
If piracy is so bad why is china having double digits growth in the mist of rampant piracy?
Why are the artists there producing less?
The reasoning of pro-copyrights people just don’t make sense, after all where rampant piracy should decimate the market it make it grow more how?
What’s truly hilarious is a company actually complaining about there being too much demand for the very product it sells! LMAO! Oh noooooooes, it’s sooo terrible… whatever can we dooooo?!?!…
Hard times indeed.
Filed a late submission eh? Must have been delivered through Bittorrent, haha! Usenext and Rapidshare. Those are fast and reliable. Bittorrent is not.
If one steals shit one is always better off. Some people think it’s not fair to steal shit from another person. That’s why they made laws and came up with cops and all.
So go ahead and steall stuff too. But eventually the cops will come after you. And you’ll be blaming the US, New world orders, SUVs, bananas et cetera.
@11: Neostyles, no amount of your pissing and moaning is going to change Canadian law. I don’t know if you have been paying attention, but Canadians pay a levy on blank media, which is then distributed to the entertainment industry. I think that’s fair, considering the amount of file sharers in Canada.
11
my friend just sent me this article on FB n ur comment
i used to buy a lot of the stuff i downloaded but after ur comemnt im gonna stop buying n just keep downloading since u allrdy think im a thief might aswell go be 1.
A friend just send me a word document using MSN. Since this is technically P2P, it took 34 minutes…
This has gone too far…
Awww that sucks, who deleted neo’s anal prolapse/voodoo doll post, it was comedy…
[Moderator replies: if it's someone using someone else's nick, to make statements like that, it gets deleted]
The problem here is threefold :
1) Canada’s media levey’s are not intended to compensate for the effects of piracy. As such, using them that way would prove insufficient.
2) Most people don’t use CD-Rs to pirate. This isn’t the 1980s. People use the internet.
3) Considering the above, most pirates will buy few CDs and thus incur little to no levy charges, while they pirate hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of material.
@14 : Very mature.
@21 :
You are taking something without paying for it. You are using something without compensating the author. Isn’t that stealing by definition?
Like many people, you are confusing cause with effect. DRM didn’t cause piracy. Piracy caused DRM.
I thought you guys should see this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnQXLEtD5Do
At the end of the day neo styles even though he is a cock is right taking something that somebody made without paying for it is stealing it doesnt matter if you take it form the shelves or off of the internet theft is theft. To those of you that claim file sharing isnt stealing your far from right if someone was to walk down your street and borrow your car and then share it with their friends you would call the cops plain and simple. If someone walked upto you on the street and robbed you for your wallet you would call the cops. Just because you dont see the person your taking from doesnt mean your not stealing. I am a pirate I download anything and everything that I can from dvdr to games to music to programs. This doesn’t mean im not a thief, of course im a thief I have 100 xbox and xbox 360 games that I have not paid for I have over 200 music albums all of which i downloaded and didnt pay for and as for movies i have trash bags full of burned dvds going back to when dvd burners were new items. Or would you like to say that I have done nothing wrong and all of this os ok because im not making any money from it and it was file sharing? If you say yes to that then your a moron plain and simple and you clearly have no clue as to what rules and laws are. I am an internet thief and i say it proudly. You others are just hypocrites.
steal – noun
1. to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force
As non of you file sharers have the permission or the right then it is stealing stop trying to justify yourself by saying it is ok. Theft is Theft regardless or how you look at it.
The net is neutral and always will be, despite some attempted dictates.
Remember bookburning?
To the folks here who seem to be against that and/or file-sharing; consider that your own freedoms will suffer when others’ freedoms do. It’s not like you live on another planet or don’t have any family and friends, right?
To those who are taking a devil’s advocate stance, (even though they secretly believe in file-sharing), thanks for the inspirations… but I think you can do better with stronger arguments, right?
Because even if we agree that file-sharing is theft, your arguments still flop, in part, because if you don’t want your stuff to be stolen, then you simply need to keep it to yourself at home under lock and key– Especially in today’s day and age with rampant thievery. I mean, come on. :)
The point is people are saying that file sharing is not stealing. It is stealing and bit torrent (all though its not the only way) is one of the main stream ways to do this. This is why there is a big stink about it. Screwdrivers are perfectly legal, however you can get arrested in some countries UK and USA for sure just by carrying one in your pocket it’s classed as going equipped to commit a crime. People look at bit torrent the same way, they forget the 100’s of reasons that it’s not a bad thing but only look to the few reasons why it’s bad. Unfortunatly people like tpb crew and anyone else who turn around and blatantly rub it in the faces of anti piracy groups are the ones causing the problem. When bit torrent was first introduced the riaa and mpaa didn’t give a rats ass about it, they were more interested in things like kazaa and direct connect, then all of a sudden you had 1000’s of websites all offering torrents or links to torrents of copyrighted material. Then on top of that you had certain “groups” of people that were being asked to remove the infringing content and then getting told to stfu as their laws don’t apply. Then they started to take more and more notice of it. Now the problem is we all have to try to prove how good bit torrent actually is, and that is going to be nearly impossible. Everyone of us that has used bit torrent to download anything that isn’t legally free is a part of the reason this program is hated so much. We are all to blame. Just how many of us can actually admit to it is another thing entirely.
Hmmm…this is one way to put it but here is another.
If someone came to my house and copied my car I wouldn’t care, if someone on the street came and copied my wallet I wouldn’t care so no it is not stealing people didn’t take anything from anybody technically.
People are not going on and stealing T-Shirts, mugs or other physical things that is the difference people are making their own with their own resources but are not allowed because what we have today is a monopoly and every one knows monopolies are bad or not?
If IP(Intelectual Property) is so important to growth how is it that the 3rd world countries that have rampant piracy grow at and accelerated pace?
Is China the king of piracy in the world no getting double digits growth?
IP is a barrier so tall that it slow down research and development it should be kept at a minimum just enough to make the mule go for it.
And that is what you get when you don’t have balanced laws, you get rampant disobedience, people loose confidence and start ignoring ridiculous laws.
One can argue all they want that is against the law but laws are written by man and they do change and in most cases they do change to conform to the reality on the ground that is the real truth. Like the squatters in the 19th century america that fought 2 decades and were granted special laws that to this day are valid. In the middle ages people revolted against laws and is history is just repeating itself.
If people start loosing their jobs you think people will pay for tollbooths in real life? what make people think they will respect imaginary goods?
@35
Yeah, I totally agree with you.
Its too late to do anything now. People at BitTorrent Inc. are just wasting their time.
@ Tard
If someone made a copy of my car and shared it with the whole world, I wouldnt give a damn. We aren’t stealing the original master, just sharing the finished prints, so the rest of the class can see what we have.
To everyone who says sharing is theft, read this http://mises.org/books/against.pdf for a very persuasive rebuke.
For those who are too lazy to read, basically, it says that property is just a civilized solution to the problem of scarcity (that actually works, unlike communism) – since tangible things are scarce, they have to be divided someway, and private property is currently the best known way of dividing them.
Therefore, intellectual property is an oxymoron, because thoughts are not scarce. I can think the same thought as you without me diminishing yours, i can use the same idea as you do to my benefit, without taking away yours. This means that anyone advocating intellectual property laws is basically advocating creating artificial scarcity where none naturally exists by the way of granting state enforced monopoly. Is it such a surprise that people with common sense are fighting against monetizing thoughts?
As for copyright, if it would be used as originally intended, that is short time of monopoly to provide incentive for creation, followed by putting the work into public domain to benefit everyone in the society, i doubt there would be many opposing it. But the corporate mafiaa bribed our “representatives” to make laws which benefit privileged few instead of the society as a whole.
@ 40 Aug 03, 2009 at 15:40 by Odin
Well said. I’m familiar with that angle and wish others were before wading into the subject.
“For those who are too lazy to read…”
They would do well to do their research, homework.
It’s not like they don’t have the world’s greatest library at their fingertips.
The net is much more than torrents. ;)
@40, thank you, well said.
Copying is not theft. Theft is about physical stuff and can’t apply to the virtual, where nothing moves, nothing changes hands. If you copy a song, your HD doesn’t get heavier, what did you steal?
Illegal copying is a rights violation. You are violating the rights-owner’s ability to control distribution. This is not theft. You don’t steal rights, you infringe them. Saying this is theft, over and over and over and over and over and over again won’t make it so. If you’re going to attack the pirates, at least get your accusations straight. At least, that way, you’ll understand the counter-arguments.
As for this bittorrent throttling thing, it’s just plain sad. If they make is too bad then people will just start encrypting the traffic or hiding it in other traffic. Eventually, we’ll just bypass the ISPs entirely and start setting up our own wireless ad-hock P2P. You can’t stop the future… maybe slow it down a little, but not stop. ‘Aint it nice when our tech companies are the ones trying to stop progress; the sooner we get rid of them, the better.
http://keliso.com
@42 “Illegal copying is a rights violation.”
I think it would be more precise to call it privilege, not a right.
Right is something that is considered inherently tied to a person, and irrevocable, such as right to life, right to free speech,… Please not that you cannot relinquish, nor contract away a right (for example by selling it), such contract would be illegal. This is not the case of copy”right”.
Copy”right” is not a right in this sense, because it allows one human to restrict the activity of another. So, it is not something necessary for society, it is just a policy to encourage creation, nothing more.
Typo in previous post, substitute Please not … by Please note …
“012 Smile” is blocking bit-torrent traffic in Israel.
I swear that me and my friends (all lawyers) will sue them one day. and “Bezeq”. – stupid IsraEli(te)s ISPs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezeq
http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/012_%D7%A1%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%99%D7%9C
bit-torrent (free speech) + truth (atheism) = RULE!!!
love and peace (and, maybe, hope — if at all?) from Israel.
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