Julien Danjou

and others replied to my “please don’t obfuscate BitTorrent” post, pointing out providers in {France, Canada} that already filter BitTorrent one way or another. I’ve read similar things about some DSL providers in Germany (Telekom however is proud that they don’t do that).

But basically this only shows my point: by having the major p2p filesharing protocols use non-standard ports and non-detectable protocols, more and more providers take measures like doing QoS for non-standard ports or filtering them altogether. And just as you reported, this has bad side effects on the ability of other users to e.g. use VoIP or play online games.

Remember: my point is to make P2P protocols easy to filter/limit by routers, so provider do NOT block/throttle all non-HTTP connections, but can selectively throttle only P2P filesharing when they think they need to. Because otherwise they’ll break other stuff such as online games and VoIP.

Now by putting your BitTorrent on ports such as 80 or some VoIP port which isn’t throttled, you only cause these providers to e.g. install a transparent proxy for these services. You make it only worse.

I agree that you don’t have that much choice in countries where there is some kind of monopoly there. But then this increase in filtering will probably allow new companies to enter the market.