The Chinese government has been busily shutting down Bittorrent sharing sites over the last 10 days causing a rush to download across China according to Sina. The rush to download has degraded Bittorrent services with the remaining servers that are still up and running.
As the largest BT download website in China with 5 million downloads each year, VeryCD has been on the verge of closure after the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) shut hundreds of similar peer-to-peer file sharing sites, including the 50 million-user BTChina, during the last 10 days in its latest attempt to fight pornography and piracy online. Source: Sina
What makes this different is that some of the Bittorrent sites have applied for licenses to distribute media, audio and video but have been unable to get official distribution licenses from the Chinese Government. Bittorrent sites in China often have a lot of material that is monitored or censored by the government, and that is part of the reason for the clamp down.
The calls for Bittorrent and other rapid sharing sites to be nurtured by the Chinese government is also an interesting call coming from people who are closely aligned with the survival of the Bittorrent system. With the closure of the Pirate Bay and other mega Bittorrent servers in the west, Bittorrent is quickly hitting the endangered species list for file sharing.
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(Cross-posted @ TechWag)
