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Comment by CWuestefeld | Hacker News Reader

This is only DNS, there's no ".p2p side of the Internet". It's only providing a lookup for IP addresses based on a name.

One can easily set up a .com or what-have-you that's also got a .p2p equivalent, e.g. "ChrisWSite.com" and "ChrisWSite.p2p" have the same IP address.

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DNS queries can be filtered, categorized and reported just as easily as any other type of traffic.

Regardless of the tech, it's the fragmentation that this sort of behavior causes that is the real problem.

... Only when using the ISP's DNS. The point of the project is to locally catch .p2p requests before they hit a DNS server and do the lookup locally. (So they can't be filtered, categorized and reported.) The local table would be provided by what appears to be force-encrypted BitTorrent traffic.

"According to the project’s website, the goal is to “create an application that runs as a service and hooks into the hosts DNS system to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other request cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a locally hosted DNS database.”"

The encryption part of this is perhaps the most interesting. However, even without breaking the encryption, I have to think that there will be ways to identify requests base on pre and post data.

We know what encrypted Torrent traffic looks like. We don't need to know exactly what is being transmitted, only that an encrypted torrent session has been started. Similarly, I'm guessing that we would be able to draw conclusions based on size, timing and flow?

Considering they haven't been able to successfully block the downloading of quite plainly illegal material, I seriously doubt they'll be able to block simple text files. When there's a will, there's a way.

ISP's don't want to block Torrent traffic. They want to figure out how to make more money from it.

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