Amid much chest-bumping, Belgian and Swiss authorities shut down Razorback2, one of the biggest servers on the eDonkey network.
The Motion Picture Association heralded the crackdown, noting that, aside from movies, music and software, users traded child porn, bomb-making instructions and terrorist training videos.
“Razorback2 was not just an enormous index for Internet users engaged in illegal file swapping, it was a menace to society,” MPA EVP and Worldwide Anti-Piracy Director John G. Malcolm said in a press release.
But p2p foes shouldn't break out the pom-poms just yet.
Even though Razorback accounted for one-third of the network's users, the raid's effect on the eDonkey network traffic was practically nil.
"On a technical level that isn't particularly surprising," Andrew Parker, chief technical officer at CacheLogic, a UK-based watcher of Internet traffic patterns, told the E-Commerce Times. "The Razorback server is purely an eDonkey index server. It doesn't actually contain any of the illegal content itself, just the details of who is sharing what content."
Indeed, it seems that Razorback's downfall amounted to an episode of online Darwinism, as the network was somewhat less than state-of-the-art.
"Razorback2 uses the old eDonkey protocol, which is in some ways similar to the old Napster protocol in that it relies on central servers," Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco told the E-Commerce Times. "For the last four to five years, peer-to-peer protocols have been decentralized, so in some ways, by shutting down Razorback2, they're shutting down an antique in the peer-to-peer world."
Parker, of CacheLogic, explained that modern eDonkey clients, such as eMule, automatically download a list of index servers at startup. With Razorback2 out of the picture, eDonkey clients are just rerouting traffic to the more than 100 index servers still in operation.