Worth noting that the original article from TorrentFreak is here: http://torrentfreak.com/isp-speeds-up-customers-bittorrent-d...

This was submitted already to HN yesterday, but did not gather enough votes to make it to the front page, which seems like a shame as this is a very interesting and noteworthy development.

Why do they need to modify the .torrent?

If they simply read passing .torrent files and acted as a peer-then-seed, wouldn't they get the same benefit?

Perhaps the problem with that is they want to firewall off non-customer IPs. Would this make them look like a bad torrent peer and so get poor download rates from other peers? If so, couldn't they snag their customer's incoming data blocks to populate their seed?

Maybe they are relying on the (now invalid?) assumption that tracking is always legal while seeding is not.

But just tracking gains them nothing, surely?

They need to hold a seed themselves to get the bandwidth benefits? Or have I misunderstood what they're doing?

Oh Ok I see. It appears (from the dearth of quoted text on the linked article) that they are running both a tracker _and_ a seed. The seeder is for their customers only, because then they don't have to pay for upstream access. The p2p connections stay within their network. They don't want to seed normally because they don't want to connect with non-customers, and being choosy like that would make them appear to be a bad peer. So they use this second tracker to inform their customers of this special seeder and of each other. Sounds like a win-win to me.

If this is a good-faith effort, it'd make sense to make it configurable, like the HTTP proxies that ISPs were running back in the day.

Some ISPs still run HTTP caching proxies, and some do not allow you to bypass them.

I'm sure they've double and triple checked this with their legal departments, but this strikes me as being ripe for a lawsuit. If the MPAA (or Israeli equivalent) can prove that the ISP is caching copies of illegal torrents it doesn't seem like there's much to defend in court.

I was under the impression that Israel had really weak copyright protection. I thought that basically file sharing was allowed, or at least not prosecuted, unless it was commercial.

You forget that big business ISP's are in bed with big business MPAA/RIAA-like groups. The only reason ISP's ever side with the consumer is that is who pays their bills and makes them a tidy profit. The day they can figure out how to make both sides happy (and line their pockets with the cash from each) they'll do it in an instant.

If they figure out a way to make both sides happy, surely any cash that lines their pockets will be well-deserved.

indeed, profit is the bottom line

It still breaks netneutrality, right?

Anything that helps bandwidth customers without actually adding more capacity is going to break net neutrality. Since adding more capacity for all means that a larger and larger amount is going to be dark most of the time, it seems like it could be worthwhile to break net neutrality in cases where it's a win for at least some and a loss for no one.