BTChina

» see btchina.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

For about a week in December 2009, China turned its torrents off. honestly, the state did not pick one site to make an example of, it went at the whole category, and inside a few days hundreds of BitTorrent trackers went dark. The largest name on that list was BTChina, the index something like fifty million people leaned on for their movies and their shows. i knew torrents well enough. i never touched this one, because it sat on the far side of a language i cannot read.

so this is reconstruction, read off other people's reporting. anyway, BTChina started in 2003 as one person's project, a developer named Huang Xiwei who built it out of his own interest in getting at foreign television. it grew the way these things did when they filled a real hole, from a hobby page into the biggest BitTorrent portal in the country. It did not host the files. it held the.torrent links that pointed your client at them, which in practice was the same thing.

What it pointed at was mostly the stuff a Chinese viewer in the mid-2000s could not get any legal way. American series a week after they aired, and whole seasons carried in by volunteer subtitle crews. in those days broadband was arriving in Chinese cities faster than any legal place to watch was. BTChina sat in that gap and got enormous, and being enormous and having an address is what eventually got it killed.

this happened a world away from where i was sitting. late in 2009 the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television started clearing out video sites that ran without its license, and by early December it had shut something in the range of four hundred of them. BTChina was the headline. it put up a short notice saying the SARFT had pulled its registration and it had no license to carry audio or video, and that was the end. the tracker that had pointed at half a country's downloads pointed at nothing.

~ the record ~

~ the funny part ~

i read about this later, but the part people remember is the panic. word got around before the axe actually fell that the trackers were about to go, and for a few days a lotta users just downloaded everything they could reach while they still could (close enough). back then it was the digital version of stripping the shelves before a storm. people grabbed films they would never watch, on the logic that the door was closing.

~ what got buried with it ~

The odd thing is which site lived and which one did not. VeryCD, the eD2k index, survived this same 2009 sweep and only lost its media links two years later. BTChina, running on open BitTorrent, went in the first wave and did not come back. anyway, a pure protocol like BitTorrent has no center anyone can switch off, but a tracker is a center, a single named address the notice can be mailed to. BTChina had made itself exactly that kind of address, and in China in 2009 an address was a liability.

what disappeared was not the ability to torrent, that carried on quietly for years. what went was the one well-kept front door a huge number of people used to find things, the map rather than the roads. Huang's site is a footnote now even in China. it mattered enormously for about six years and then, in a week that took hundreds of sites with it, it just was not there anymore.

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