BitTorrent Still Dominates Internet’s Upstream Traffic

The comparison is confusing... &quot;Netflix&quot;, &quot;Google Cloud&quot;, &quot;HTTP&quot;, &quot;SSL = OTHER&quot;. Aren&#x27;t Netflix and Google cloud using http and https?<p>Also, no mention of video chat. I believe google hangout, zoom.us, appear.in etc... work in peer to peer fashion when conferencing one on one, which is probably more difficult to measure, but I&#x27;m sure are significant contributor towards upstream usage.<p>This is really important because the upstream bandwidth offered by ISPs right now is ridiculous, and if the perception is that only &quot;pirate&quot; using BitTorrent use upstream, it&#x27;s not going to get better any time soon.

How was this measured? From my perspective, from knowing and chatting with semi-professional sharers daily, most bitorrrent traffic is encrypted. Torrent clients can all encrypt and are generally set to use only encrypted connections. And serious sharers have switched to VPNs en mass. So how was all this bittorrent traffic identified?<p>Fyi, there are some tricks for overcoming bittorent encryption. I&#x27;ve used them to identify what was is shared across private networks (schools) but the techniques involve some trickery that is probably illegal on the public internet.

&quot;While BitTorrent has many legitimate uses most data is transferred by pirated files.&quot; - is this just an assumption, or is there actual data to back this up? Seems like it may not be the easiest thing to track (especially with a lot of people trying to claim all torrent traffic as piracy).

How is Netflix second in upstream traffic, at 6.78%? What are users sending to Netflix besides an occasional request for more data and maybe some telemetry?

I&#x27;m skeptical of these figures. Nearly all BitTorrent traffic is encrypted and is indistinguishable from HTTPS&#x2F;SSL traffic. How do they know that a host sending encrypted traffic to a handful of other hosts is BitTorrent traffic? It could be any number of things.