Apparently, everything in the Comcast garden is rosy these days, with previous arch-rival BitTorrent now working things out together over afternoon tea. However, not everyone is celebrating.

In 2007, Robb Topolski discovered and documented the Comcast interference, informed TorrentFreak and we published an article which ignited the whole debate. It’s safe to say, he’s been following this one closely.

Here are his thoughts on the Comcast / BitTorrent reconciliation:

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I’m probably a key figure as to why we’re all talking about Network Neutrality again. I was having a problem uploading on Gnutella in early 2007. I tracked it down to Comcast using Sandvine-injected RST packets. Blog stories led to press stories which led to independent confirmation. And here we are today. Peace and harmony? Probably not.

Today Comcast and BitTorrent seems to have solved world hunger — and I’d love nothing more than to be optimistic about it. But I cannot be. As they say on Slashdot — show video, or it didn’t happen. This deal is treachery, relies on how much we can trust the word of Comcast, and leaves the public interests out in the cold.

I think it’s strange that anyone believes a word that Comcast says. This is the Comcast that:

1. Told the FCC in 2005 that they would not degrade traffic in order to convince the FCC that network neutrality regulations were not needed.

2. Started degrading P2P traffic the very next year, and failed to tell anyone what they were doing.

3. Used a system that utilized forgery, and successfully placed blame on the other peer instead of Comcast.

4. Denied it when caught.

5. Then changed their story when the denials were not believed, but still never came out and said what they were doing.

6. Then they justified their actions by throwing their other Cable-Internet brothers and sisters under the bus with their “they do it too!” defense

7. Then stealthily changed the AUP days before an FCC filing where they referred to the new provisions.

8. When the changed AUP started getting press attention, they stated that a prominent story on Comcast.net alerted millions of visitors of the change and accused Marvin Ammori of crying wolf. (Google cache proved that nothing alerted users to the changed AUP until the day after the press started asking questions.)

9. Then they packed the Harvard FCC hearing.

This company has not demonstrated that you can trust its promises, nor can you believe its assertions. Comcast just used BitTorrent Inc. as a tool to try and defang the FCC.

BitTorrent Inc. is a content provider. Vuze, who actually DID make a complaint and petition to the FCC, is a competitor. Neither BitTorrent, Vuze, nor Comcast represents the interests of 12 million Comcast users nor the The Internet Society nor the public. And this middle-of-the-night deal was made without their input.

Nothing has changed. The RST interference continues. It was a wrongful act. BitTorrent Inc. has no right making a deal with Comcast allowing it to continue to commit wrongful acts until it finally decides it is ready to stop. The correct relief is to stop the interference immediately and to FULLY DISCLOSE what it did and to accept responsibility for those actions. (Even today, Comcast’s Policy VP refused to answer questions about the interference.)

Their word is worthless. Until the interference stops, I have no reason to believe it will. Until either meaningful competition returns to broadband, or until sufficient government regulation enforces Network Neutrality, we have no reason to think that this agreement will last through the night.

Robb Topolski

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TorrentFreak confronted Ashwin Navin of BitTorrent Inc. with Robb’s comments, and he told us: “We decided to collaborate with Comcast because they agreed to stop using RSTs, increase upload capacity, and evaluate network hardware that accelerates media delivery and file transfers. We’re at the beginning of the formal collaboration, but Robb’s work was instrumental to identify the offending practice. We need him and the community to keep an eye on ISPs across the world.”

“Our work with Comcast will benefit all P2P development because Comcast has agreed to manage traffic at Layer 3 (the network layer) rather than Layers 4-7 (the protocol/application layers). This is a core component of the neutrality debate,” he added.

As always, time will tell…

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So in the near future it could be that you’re downloading your favorite torrents from your ISP’s server instead of some random seed or peer at the other side of the globe.

Currently, “regular” BitTorrent is traffic is suffering from throttling ISP’s that claim that BitTorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes. This morivated the developers of the most popular BitTorrent clients implement encryption to protect BitTorrent users from being slowed down by their ISP’s.

However, Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol and the developer of the mainline BitTorrent client did not believe that encryption was the solution, and found (tohether with Cachelogic) a more ISP friendly alternative. However, this new and improved version is promising the opposite, downloads will be accelerated instead of throttled. However, only for commercially licensed content.

Ashwin Navin, President and Co-founder of BitTorrent states:

“CacheLogic has developed an innovative solution to address a major problem that all ISPs face with respect to network congestion. Today, people use the Internet for many bandwidth-intensive services and consumers are increasingly aware of the quality of service needed for their favourite applications. With the popularity of BitTorrent usage worldwide, ISP networks are being taxed in a way they weren’t designed for. As a remedy to this, the Cache Discovery Protocol is providing carriers with an economical and scalable solution that improves the end-user experience for applications that consumers are growing to love.”

press release.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Currently, “regular” BitTorrent is traffic is suffering from throttling ISP’s that claim that BitTorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes. However, this new and improved version is promising the opposite, downloads will be accelerated instead of throttled. However, only for commercially licensed content.

But how does this affect the widely debated “network neutrality”?

BBC’s Newsnight asked Bram Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent about this.

“I most definitely do not want the internet to become like television where there’s actual censorship… however it is very difficult to actually create network neutrality laws which don’t result in an absurdity like making it so that ISPs can’t drop spam or stop… (hacker) attacks. ”

Does the Cachelogic proposal violate network neutrality? “Depending on how you define net neutrality that violates some definitions of it,” says Cohen.

And would he feel comfortable if a media company using BitTorrent did start seeking network priority for its data?

“It depends really on the nature of the whole thing… I’m against net censorship. However when you’re talking about large file transfers going to very large numbers of people there frequently are significant costs involved… (the media companies) are frequently bearing a lot of costs already today. They make some stuff available and pay for bandwidth on it so it’s just a question of the download costs as well as the upload costs.”

hmmm…

read on

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.