Azureus fights Bittorrent throttling ISPs

Downloading copyrighted content via peer to peer (P2P), like Bittorrent, is obviously illegal, but if you’re sharing legal and open source content there’s no reason why you should be blocked. Unfortunately though many internet service providers (ISPs), particularly in North America, have for a while now decided to “throttle”, or disrupt Bittorrent traffic. Rightly so, Bittorrent client developers and the whole peer to peer community has risen up against this method, which it considers to be illegal.

Azureus, famous for its excellent Bittorrent client of the same name, decided to fight back and petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US, managing to obtain a hearing back in December. Azureus were looking for more information about Bittorrent throttling to be made available. And because you can’t trust anybody better than yourself, Azureus have also decided to create a plugin which works with their Vuze client (also known as Azureus 3) “to gather information about potential interference with your Internet traffic.” You can also find a full list of Bittorrent-throttling IPSs worldwide on Azureus’ wiki.

One of the best ways to counter Bittorrent throttling still remains to encrypt your connection, however it’s not guaranteed to work everytime. The very practice of Bittorrent throttling by ISPs is quite disturbing as it can be interpreted as an act of defiance against anybody using P2P. It’s understandable that ISPs want to fight illegal downloading, but what about people who use Bittorrent legally? It’s good to see such a strong member of the P2P community like Azureus, intent on defending their users.

[Via: TorrentFreak]