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At the end of October one of the admins of the world's largest Bittorrent site sat down for an interview and predicted the protocol's demise. Citing Bittorrent, Inc.'s corporate ties and some technical limitations, brokep announced that The Pirate Bay was working on a new protocol to succeed Bram Cohen's Bittorrent. The idea's been percolating throughout the filesharing scene since then: a small survey of top site admins conducted by TorrentFreak found opinion divided over whether Bittorrent will be replaced.

It's true that the protocol's been asked to do things that its creator didn't envision. Clients now use encryption to get around ISP traffic shaping and sometimes pad files to improve interoperability with other networks. DHT functionality, which removes the need for a central tracker, was implemented in a chaotic, piecemeal fashion. Private trackers have to monkey around with torrents' announce URLs in order to monitor individual users' activity. Torrent files lack metadata. Traversing firewalls remains an issue. And various researchers have created custom clients that prove the protocol can be subverted by selfish users. There are tacked-on, vulnerable and subpar aspects to the way Bittorrent works — plenty of room for improvement, in other words.

But assuming a technically superior standard is produced, will it be adopted? It's easy to find examples for and against: the Ogg Vorbis audio codec offers better sound quality than MP3, no licensing entanglements, and several awfully-cool features (like the ability to reduce a file's size without reencoding it). But Ogg has never really caught on. Some users employ the also-technically-superior WMA and AAC formats, but only to the extent that Microsoft and Apple force them. For most users, MP3 seems to be good enough. On the other hand, online video has adopted new codecs almost as soon as they become available, moving from VCD to SVCD to MPEG to DivX to Xvid and beyond. The situation's so complex that utilities exist for the sole purpose of untangling a given AVI's miasma of codecs.

What makes these cases differ? It all comes down to timing: consumers will switch technical standards so long as doing so carries few costs (i.e. only requires that more free software be downloaded). Ogg Vorbis hadn't attracted enough attention by the time portable MP3 players arrived. Once the supply chain for MP3 decoding chips was established and a generation of compatible players purchased, the game was pretty well decided. By comparison, only a handful of exotic DVD players bother to support the video formats commonly found on P2P networks. Most portable digital video players still count on users recompressing their files to save space and conserve CPU cycles. Once there's an established infrastructure — of either hardware, accumulated code or simple corporate momentum — consumers may stick with suboptimal technical standards. But prior to that point, users will stay close to the cutting edge.

Bittorrent seems to be on the cusp of this transition. Some hardware devices are coming to market with the standard baked in, but not too many. Various organizations like Miro, Joost and Blizzard Software are building parts of their business around the protocol, but not in an irreversible manner. If Bittorrent gains much more attention, its supporting infrastructure of trackers and open source projects will likely trump whatever advantages a new standard can offer. But I think that there remains a window of opportunity for elite users to popularize a new protocol, should they settle on one. Brokep and his peers still have a few months to steal BT's thunder.

Tom Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tom Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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An anonymous reader writes to tell us that according to a recent report from the World Economic Forum the US has lost the leading spot for technology innovation. The new reigning champ is now apparently Denmark with other Nordic neighbors Sweden, Finland and Norway all claiming top spots as well. "Countries were judged on technological advancements in general business, the infrastructure available and the extent to which government policy creates a framework necessary for economic development and increased competitiveness."

haddieman notes that while many people are getting more and more annoyed at DRM, Norway actually did something about it. The PC World article explains: "Good intentions, questionable execution. European legislators have been giving DRM considerable attention for a while, but Norway has actually gone so far as to declare that Apple's iTunes store is illegal under Norwegian law. The crux of the issue is that the Fairplay DRM that is at the heart of the iTunes/iPod universe doesn't work with anything else, meaning that if you want access to the cast iTunes library, you have to buy an iPod."

seriouslywtf writes "Europe is upping the pressure on Apple to open up its restrictive DRM that ties iTunes to the iPod. Norway ruled last year that the iPod-iTunes tie-in was unreasonable and gave Apple a deadline to make a change to its policies, but was unsatisfied with the response they got. Now France and Germany have joined forces with Norway, making it a lot harder for Apple to just walk away from those markets. From the article: 'France's consumer lobby group, UFC-Que Choisir, and Germany's Verbraucherzentrale are now part of the European effort to push Apple into an open DRM system, with more countries considering joining the group. However, the company has been under some fire over the last year due to those restrictions, first with France and then Denmark looking to open up restrictive DRM schemes (including, but not limited to iTunes) ... Norwegian consumer groups were unimpressed by Apple's response. Norway has now given Apple a new deadline of September of this year to change its policies, and the pressure on Apple will likely grow in the months leading up to the deadline.'"