BiTIT: Throttling BitTorrent illegal traffic

Lately, Peer-to-Peer (p2p) networks like BitTorrent, Limeware and eMule have gained a large popularity as free of charge services to download any kind of files, mostly multimedia contents. Recent reports indicate that near 60 percent of all the current P2P Internet traffic is due to BitTorrent. The music and movies industry, blame BitTorrent among other systems for their falling sales in the USA and Europe, and hence with the help of ISPs started to find ways to throttle their communication. BitTorrent users always found ways to override these obstacles. This ongoing cat and mouse game between ISPs and BitTorrent client developers is about to enter new level. In this paper, we analyze a proposal of a BitTorrent traffic blocking on the network layer and its effects on the peers download efficiency. Our analyses show that in worst case scenarios, our predicted throttling technique could reduce the number of peers succeeding in downloading the copyright protected content to 49 percent.