The Register has published an alarmist piece of disinformation on how BitTorrent’s move to UDP transport is going hurt VoIP and gaming and cause the Internet to collapse.  This is the exact opposite of what we intended for the Plicto transport protocol (now uTorrent’s uTP).  Our intent was to be as gentle as possible to the network, yielding to competing TCPs and non-adaptive, delay-sensitive traffic like VoIP and gaming, but making efficient use of available capacity in the absence of competing traffic.  Bennett comes off sounding like a shill for the ISP’s, who are heavily invested politically and technologically in “traffic management”.

Luckily, saner heads are prevailing in pieces around the blogosphere and in the comments for the Register article itself.  I am hopeful that Stanislav’s work to open and standardize this approach to congestion control encourages a variety of independent implementations and experiments that will help clear up a lot of the disinformation.