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An Evening with BitTorrent
May 3, 2006
BitTorrent as an organization, incorporated in the state of California, managed to swing from one end of the popular opinion spectrum to the other in a matter weeks. Precipitated by Bram Cohen’s deal with the MPAA, in which unauthorized material would be removed from his content search engine, public opinion subsequently degraded. BitTorrent’s reputation faired little better in the later months, as Bram Cohen’s views on certain issues met with widespread opposition from the community. With a floundering public opinion and an apparent disconnect with the community, is BitTorrent, Inc. becoming the George W. Bush of the file-sharing world?No stranger to the opinions of the file-sharing community, Slyck.com met with Ashwin Navin, President of BitTorrent, Inc., in New York City. In town for a panel discussion in Tribeca along with director Steven Soderbergh, Todd Wagner of 2929 Entertainment and Dean Garfield of MPAA, BitTorrent, Inc.’s participation stressed that what most of us already know – online movie distribution is coming – if not already here. Afterwards, Ashwin opened up about BitTorrent, BitTorrent Inc., and the misconceptions people have about the force behind the largest Internet revolution since the World Wide Web.
“I sometimes lose the will to live after reading Slyck.com,” Ashwin joked. “The community can be brutal.”
The brutality Ashwin speaks of is the discontent expressed not only within the Slyck.com forums, but the prevalent attitude throughout the file-sharing community. Once held high on the file-sharing pedestal amongst heroes such as Ares Galaxy, FrostWire and the now defunct “Audio Galaxy”, words of praise have turned into scorn, as “traitor” and “greed” are now used to describe BitTorrent, Inc.
These words are often used by disenfranchised consumers and file-shares who often equate any dealings with the entertainment industry as treasonous. It didn’t help BitTorrent’s public relations when in November 2005, Bram Cohen announced a deal with the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America.) The understanding between the two left the door open for future distribution arrangements, while guaranteeing BitTorrent.com’s search engine would abide by any takedown requests.
However these criticisms aren’t dismissed by Ashwin or BitTorrent, Inc. Ashwin readily accepts them not only as valid, but also as an opportunity to address and correct many of the notions about his company.
“It’s easy to come to that conclusion [about BitTorrent] when you see scary press releases from MPAA or RIAA that vilify us as consumers and customers of their product,” Ashwin said. “There are people within these organizations, within record labels, within movie studios, within the trade associations that question those tactics as well. So…by coming to [that] conclusion [about BitTorrent] isn’t an unreasonable thing to do. The content industry is on the verge of embracing these technologies. In the past the lawyers in these businesses governed the decision making with respect to peer to peer (P2P) and in the coming months the business people and the decision makers outside of the legal organization are going to weigh in and decide how they want to work with P2P developers in general.”
Yet an understanding of the community’s concerns and progressively rectifying them are two different things. Many in the BitTorrent community have found it necessary to rely on alternative development resources to meet their file-sharing needs – especially end to end encryption, a result of traffic shaping and bandwidth throttling. It’s the practice of some reactionary ISPs (Internet Service Provider) to allocate a limited amount of bandwidth to the BitTorrent application, resulting in snail’s pace download and upload speed.
But BitTorrent, Inc. can’t be reactionary as well, Ashwin argues, as it’s forced to wear more than one hat in the digital distribution world.
“An all out war with the ISPs would result in a loss for BitTorrent, and a loss for the entire community.”
Rather than code their way around the ISPs, BitTorrent, Inc. is seeking a diplomatic solution with the ISPs. Giving ISPs a reason to accept BitTorrent by articulating its legitimate potential is critical in allowing this protocol to survive.
“We spent an extraordinary amount of time face to face with the largest ISPs in the world who now see anywhere between a third and up to 70% of all their traffic in the BT protocol. [We’re] trying to convince them there’s a better way to manage the BitTorrent protocol then to limit it and to shape it. We’ve been strong advocates of the caching solution in the next version of the (Main Line) BitTorrent client, what we are calling the Allegro release. There’ll be a protocol which allows ISPs to cache BitTorrent content which is a great thing for users. It improves the user experience for downloading with BitTorrent no matter what client it is as long as it’s implemented the Cache Discovery Protocol and it also offers ISPs a cost effective way to allow BT to exist on their networks.
"A lot of ISPs did not even know there was a caching solution for the BT protocol, and as we’re taking it upon ourselves to educate them on behalf of our users and all the other developers of the protocol to implement a user friendly way to manage the cost.”
Appealing to ISPs interests and demonstrating its business potential has also been influential in allowing BitTorrent’s existence. Pairing with CacheLogic and British broadband provider NTL, BitTorrent recently announced a movie distribution deal on the ISPs 100 MB NextGen network. Testing of the distribution platform have already begun, and will serve as a litmus test for other ISPs.
The general theme of the meeting between Slyck.com and Ashwin was that of legitimacy. It ties into the BitTorrent, Inc’s deal with the MPAA, its stand on many of the issues facing the file-sharing community, and its position with the ISPs. By working with the entertainment industry and the ISPs, the future of BitTorrent is brighter for not just the business oriented, but for all parties. If BitTorrent were allowed to develop without any type of structure, it would be “easy to dismiss BitTorrent as a piracy protocol. It really has a much bigger role in the world and it’s important that there’s an organization that people can see, hear and touch.”
Part the organization Ashwin describes is establishing BitTorrent.org as a resource that developers, programmers and the community can interact and determine BitTorrent’s course. A divided BitTorrent house, one in which several divergents of the original protocol establish themselves throughout the Internet, could have dire consequences for the overall prosperity and health of information sharing.
“The number one priority for all for us as developers is to maintain the interoperability of the protocol. A forked protocol becomes difficult for ISPs to work with and to cache. All we require is better communication and understanding amongst all of us developers to set a direction for the protocol and to involve in a constructive way or to expose that discussion to the ISPs so that they don’t feel blind sided by the direction of our development. BitTorrent.org [is designed] for the purpose of creating a communication mechanism for all of us to hopefully constructively debate different directions, different extensions, the protocol can take. This includes things like encryption, cache discovery; a few of the new extensions that we’ve developed are things like Get Pieces Fast (resolves the sluggishness experienced while looking for peers) which will have dramatic performance improvements to the BT protocol.”
In other words, try to imagine a world in where BitTorrent became forked with several variants. Instead of trying to accommodate one protocol, ISPs could potentially be confronted with dozens. ISPs are showing marginal tolerance of one BitTorrent protocol, but confronted with several would likely lead to all-out rejection. BitTorrent users in the end would loose and wind up with unilateral bandwidth throttling. In this respect, Ashwin states bringing legitimacy and unity to the BitTorrent protocol is vital for the community and its widespread userbase.
Judging BitTorrent, Inc. in person and judging BitTorrent, Inc. from behind a computer screen are polar opposites. It’s easy to simply dictate that BitTorrent, Inc. is in it for the money, for the business, for the capitalist opportunity, however most of the discussion ultimately centered on the BitTorrent community and what’s best for the people who have driven it to the success it is today.
Yet an understanding of the community’s concerns and progressively rectifying them are two different things. Many in the BitTorrent community have found it necessary to rely on alternative development resources to meet their file-sharing needs – especially end to end encryption, a result of traffic shaping and bandwidth throttling. It’s the practice of some reactionary ISPs (Internet Service Provider) to allocate a limited amount of bandwidth to the BitTorrent application, resulting in snail’s pace download and upload speed.
But BitTorrent, Inc. can’t be reactionary as well, Ashwin argues, as it’s forced to wear more than one hat in the digital distribution world.
“An all out war with the ISPs would result in a loss for BitTorrent, and a loss for the entire community.”
Rather than code their way around the ISPs, BitTorrent, Inc. is seeking a diplomatic solution with the ISPs. Giving ISPs a reason to accept BitTorrent by articulating its legitimate potential is critical in allowing this protocol to survive.
“We spent an extraordinary amount of time face to face with the largest ISPs in the world who now see anywhere between a third and up to 70% of all their traffic in the BT protocol. [We’re] trying to convince them there’s a better way to manage the BitTorrent protocol then to limit it and to shape it. We’ve been strong advocates of the caching solution in the next version of the (Main Line) BitTorrent client, what we are calling the Allegro release. There’ll be a protocol which allows ISPs to cache BitTorrent content which is a great thing for users. It improves the user experience for downloading with BitTorrent no matter what client it is as long as it’s implemented the Cache Discovery Protocol and it also offers ISPs a cost effective way to allow BT to exist on their networks.
"A lot of ISPs did not even know there was a caching solution for the BT protocol, and as we’re taking it upon ourselves to educate them on behalf of our users and all the other developers of the protocol to implement a user friendly way to manage the cost.”
Appealing to ISPs interests and demonstrating its business potential has also been influential in allowing BitTorrent’s existence. Pairing with CacheLogic and British broadband provider NTL, BitTorrent recently announced a movie distribution deal on the ISPs 100 MB NextGen network. Testing of the distribution platform have already begun, and will serve as a litmus test for other ISPs.
The general theme of the meeting between Slyck.com and Ashwin was that of legitimacy. It ties into the BitTorrent, Inc’s deal with the MPAA, its stand on many of the issues facing the file-sharing community, and its position with the ISPs. By working with the entertainment industry and the ISPs, the future of BitTorrent is brighter for not just the business oriented, but for all parties. If BitTorrent were allowed to develop without any type of structure, it would be “easy to dismiss BitTorrent as a piracy protocol. It really has a much bigger role in the world and it’s important that there’s an organization that people can see, hear and touch.”
Part the organization Ashwin describes is establishing BitTorrent.org as a resource that developers, programmers and the community can interact and determine BitTorrent’s course. A divided BitTorrent house, one in which several divergents of the original protocol establish themselves throughout the Internet, could have dire consequences for the overall prosperity and health of information sharing.
“The number one priority for all for us as developers is to maintain the interoperability of the protocol. A forked protocol becomes difficult for ISPs to work with and to cache. All we require is better communication and understanding amongst all of us developers to set a direction for the protocol and to involve in a constructive way or to expose that discussion to the ISPs so that they don’t feel blind sided by the direction of our development. BitTorrent.org [is designed] for the purpose of creating a communication mechanism for all of us to hopefully constructively debate different directions, different extensions, the protocol can take. This includes things like encryption, cache discovery; a few of the new extensions that we’ve developed are things like Get Pieces Fast (resolves the sluggishness experienced while looking for peers) which will have dramatic performance improvements to the BT protocol.”
In other words, try to imagine a world in where BitTorrent became forked with several variants. Instead of trying to accommodate one protocol, ISPs could potentially be confronted with dozens. ISPs are showing marginal tolerance of one BitTorrent protocol, but confronted with several would likely lead to all-out rejection. BitTorrent users in the end would loose and wind up with unilateral bandwidth throttling. In this respect, Ashwin states bringing legitimacy and unity to the BitTorrent protocol is vital for the community and its widespread userbase.
Judging BitTorrent, Inc. in person and judging BitTorrent, Inc. from behind a computer screen are polar opposites. It’s easy to simply dictate that BitTorrent, Inc. is in it for the money, for the business, for the capitalist opportunity, however most of the discussion ultimately centered on the BitTorrent community and what’s best for the people who have driven it to the success it is today.
This story is filed in these Slyck News categories
BitTorrent :: BitTorrent Inc.
You can read the full transcript of the interview here.
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