Bram Cohen and the Bit Torrent boys are tired of simple geek adoration, and are eager to profit from their creation. As such, the company has been trying to strike deals with legitimate content developers and the RIAA/MPAA. For this reason, they're obviously not thrilled that ISPs are throttling all Bit Torrent traffic, as the throttles don't care whether Bit Torrent traffic is legit or not.

Users are getting around the traffic shaping by changing ports and employing clients that use encryption, something Bram Cohen argued wasn't the "solution" back in January. This isn't Cohen's preferred solution, clearly, because it ruins the company's financial plans. Cohen, eager to get on the right side of ISPs, has been selling the idea of caching Bit Torrent content to ISPs in order to reduce network strain.

"We spent an extraordinary amount of time face to face with the largest ISPs in the world who now see anywhere between a third and up to 70% of all their traffic in the BT protocol," recently stated Bit Torrent CEO Ashwin Narvin. "[We’re] trying to convince them there’s a better way to manage the BitTorrent protocol then to limit it and to shape it."

Their caching solution, implemented in the latest Bit Torrent client release, utilizes the "Cache Discovery Protocol” developed in cooperation with Cachelogic. The protocol makes it easy for ISPs to detect the most popular torrents, cache the data, and seed the torrent.

One obvious problem is that ISPs certainly won't be caching pirated content, which makes up the majority of Bit Torrent traffic. To control this traffic, they'll almost certainly continue to lean on traffic shaping - which leaves Cohen and company in a considerable quandary.