In a reaction to the BitTorrent encryption article posted two days ago, futurist, trends and innovation expert Jim Carroll pointed me to a related keynote address he gave during the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers conference last month.
Carrol warns the cable companies not to make the same mistake as the music industry did by “going to war” with it’s (geeky) customers.
In his talk he advised cable engineers to embrace new technologies like file-sharing and Ip-tv and Voip instead of fighting new technologies like the music industry did with MP3’s.
“Do you really want to go to war with your customers?” he asked. “The music industry went to war with its customers and look where it got them. Do you want to repeat that history? The geeks will always win because they can always rewrite the code”
Carrol urged cable officials to view the new technologies as market opportunities to be exploited rather than competitive threats to be squashed (full article).
Apparently cable providers like Shaw and Rogers don’t agree. They continue to limit the use of BitTorrent, the most traffic consuming filesharing protocol hereby starting the war between the “traffic shapers” and the “encrypters”.
uTorrent developer Ludvig Strigeus one of the pioneers of BitTorrent encryption is motivated to fight the BitTorrent throttling. In an interview with Slyck he states:
I’d like all users to be able to use BitTorrent and be able to upload and download. After all, BT is being used in many legal things, including distribution of public domain content, patches for games, and so on. An ISP shouldn’t be able to block a legitimate protocol.
Sounds fair to me…
