Apologies for the headline, but it was too appropriate to resist. It seems that there is a feature of uTorrent 2.0 now in beta that automatically detects network congestion and self-limits bandwidth to lessen it. This might provide some much-needed relief to ISPs that feel a disproportionate amount of traffic is P2P. I’m not sure whether to call this self-policing action capitulation or accommodation, but either way it probably needed to happen.

The uTP protocol is an extension of the bittorrent protocol, and essentially times packets being transferred and calculates if there is any serious delay. The idea is that this would only kick in when the network is being stressed.

We’ll see how this turns out, but who knows what other implementations of this sort we’ll be seeing. The net neutrality battle is likely to be marked by compromises on both sides. Expect to see measures taken in other areas like VoIP. It’s progress… I guess.