Google recently disabled Autocomplete and Instant search features for our trademarked company and product names, including BitTorrent, µTorrent, and torrent.

We’ve heard a lot of speculation about this move and we feel it’s important for us to provide some perspective and clarity on this situation.

BitTorrent is a technology company that builds software and standards focused on doing good. We understand that some people may use some of our technologies in ways that represent a risk to certain copyright holders, but certainly no more so than other technologies such as web browsers, DVD/CD burning software, video/audio/image codecs, ISP’s, and more. Like all of these – BitTorrent technologies have fundamentally transformed the Internet and user behavior and they are widely used for perfectly legitimate purposes.

We must also point out that, in spite of historically being a large licensee of premium content, we do not currently operate any content sites, reflector sites or content servers of any kind.  We are a technology company – not a media company or web property.

Finally, it’s important to note that many of our technologies have created material improvements for ISP’s, content creators, and large corporations.

For example:

• Apps: our new Apps platform enables independent content creators to publish their works and reach over 100 million global users for no cost whatsoever.
• Artist Spotlight: our artist spotlight program has helped several artists gain exposure, distribution and revenue through channels never before available to them.
• uTP: we created the micro-transfer protocol to mitigate traffic congestion on last mile, home and corporate networks.  This technology has been adopted by numerous companies building or using BitTorrent clients
• DNA: our DNA offering is used as a CDN overlay to dramatically reduce bandwidth costs for numerous publishers.
• BitTorrent Protocol: our native protocol was not only open-sourced by our founder, Bram Cohen, but is now used by numerous corporations around the world to efficiently distribute data for operating system upgrades, software and firmware updates, gaming environments, and more.

We respect Google, both in their right to operate their business as they see fit and as a company that has dealt with scrutiny for their success and technology innovations. While we don’t agree with Google’s current approach to omit our company and product names from their advanced search features, we do understand that they have a complex set of issues to navigate and it’s not an easy road.

However, rather than seeing them continue along their current trajectory, we would prefer to work with Google and other innovators to build technologies that help content creators and enable novel models for legitimate online content distribution.

We need Google and others to understand that BitTorrent is part of the solution – not a symptom of the problem.

Please send me your comments – the BitTorrent team and I value your feedback.

Thanks – Sha

Shahi Ghanem, Chief Strategist at BitTorrent Inc.