There are many different Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications: BitTorrent, LimeWire, Gnutella, and KaZaa to name a few more popular ones. Some are used to download legitimate software and media, some illegitimate. None of them are permitted on the USAP enterprise network for both bandwidth and security concerns. P2P applications have the potential to overwhelm the internet connections on the Ice and inadvertently bring malicious software and traffic into the network.

Now that an initial guilty verdict has been handed down in the Pirate Bay case, there's a lot of talk going on about Google being "the next Pirate Bay." In an interview with Forbes, Harvard professor Ben Edelman states "Google now can and does do what the Pirate Bay has always done."

Wait, what?

Isn't that like implicating Superpages for the extras a client receives at a massage parlor provides if that's how he found the phone number? Google does not run a public torrent tracker. Sure, they may index torrent sites for search purposes, but I'm pretty sure that I can't tell uTorrent to create a new torrent file with Google as the primary tracker for it. The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, acts as the sole tracker for some .torrent files. Without their tracker, no one would have access to such files. That's a massive difference.

I also can't open a torrent file directly on Google's site and start downloading it. Even if a direct link to the .torrent file does appear in Google's results, I'll still be redirected off-site to the actual source of the file to open it.

Eric Garland of torrent research group Big Champagne says "I've argued for years that the real battle rights holders are fighting isn't with individual users or file-sharing sites, but with search." Right. It's the link on a search result page that causes lost revenue for the RIAA and MPAA, not the actual mp3 or avi files.

Besides, there are any number of ways to find files that don't involve search engines - forums, Twitter, Facebook. I can even call my friends and give them a truncated URL to a file if i want too. If it's access to the files and not the files themselves that are the problem, then these witch hunters will have to figure out some way to prevent any form of communication imaginable.

And heck, if Google can be blamed for their involvement the companies that develop web browsers next. After all, if we didn't have web browsers we wouldn't be able to search for torrent links on Google, would we?