I just can't think of anything nice to say about the level of misinformation in this article, so I'm having to settle for saying things that aren't entirely hostile instead. To somewhat oversimplify, Richard Bennett has published an article to The Register making the claim that a recent behavioral change for uTorrent (a popular BitTorrent client) will result in the entire Internet's bandwidth being reduced by three-quarters.

We'll start with the out-and-out lie that heads up the article:

The leading BitTorrent software authors have declared war on you - and any users wanting to wring high performance out of their networks.

He then explains that this is because the authors of uTorrent have decided to make a change to the client so that it will default to UDP instead of TCP for data transfers. He goes on to compound this erroneous deduction with some, well, insanity.

By most estimates, P2P accounts for close to half of internet traffic today. When this traffic is immune to congestion control, the remaining half will stumble along at roughly a quarter of the bandwidth it has available today: half the raw bandwidth, used with half efficiency, by 95% of internet users. Oops.

There are some fundamental flaws in the argument he's trying to make here, one of the most glaring ones being that UDP is "immune to congestion control" (which he makes by proxy by quoting someone else, for those crying "but he's not the one that said it!"). This is simply untrue. UDP is no more immune to congestion control than TCP or ICMP. That is, it's not immune to actual congestion control... If your idea of "congestion control" is to spoof a disconnection request for a substantial number of the active connections going over a network segment (which in the 90's was called a "denial of service attack") then UDP would indeed be immune to this because UDP doesn't have a built-in "session" concept that can be so easily broken by an attacker, but that's not congestion control--at best that's connection harassment. (We won't go into detail right now about how badly Sandvine malfunctioned in addition to being the wrong solution.)

UDP was intended for real-time data transfers such as VoIP that typically move small amounts of data with a low tolerance for delay. [...] Bulk data transfers are supposed to use TCP, in large part because it shoulders the burden of congestion control for the internet’s end-to-end layer.

This is a more subtle derangement of the truth, but is no less untrue than the other premise Bennett makes. UDP was designed without handshaking protocols or methods of guaranteeing packet delivery so that it could facilitate very short transactions where handshaking or packet reassembly could introduce unuseful delays. There's no reason it can't be used for bulk transfers--it's just not normally used for that because it means coders would have to implement their own methods for dealing with when packets get lost or arrive out or order (which is necessary for just about anything longer than one packet) and for most coders that would be reinventing the wheel since that stuff is built into TCP. In any case, there's a distinct difference between facilitating something and being it's sole purpose.

The internet is only a stable system because application developers are gentlemanly with regard to the amount of traffic they shove onto the network.

This is another entirely untrue thing. The Internet is a stable system because it was designed to be stable and fault tolerant. It helps that coders tend to write applications which utilize bandwidth intelligently (which BitTorrent is doing with the "least first" method, and which will only get better as the protocol matures) but a great deal of time has been devoted to making the Internet tolerant of both network failures and idiot users/applications. Bennett goes on to talk about the "Jacobson Algorithm" which is basically a mechanism by which a host that's sending data can be told to slow down the rate at which it sends. Sadly, Bennett fails to realize that just because UDP doesn't have this doesn't mean a similar mechanism can't be applied to it. I say "realize" because I'm being polite. Of course, for him to mention this is possible (or likely) would break his argument.

Compounding this misinformation is the claim that "such throttling will utterly destroy VoIP" which is also entirely untrue. VoIP can be easily given higher priority than other UDP traffic just as easily as Comcast supposedly targeted only BitTorrent traffic with Sandvine.

Frankly, the level of verbal legerdemain in this man's article is up there with the claims that not bailing out Lehman Brothers is what caused "the credit freeze", which is no more sensible than saying that someone not jumping in front of a bullet is what causes the shooter to shoot.
The US Gov't didn't cause the "credit freeze" by not bailing out one company. If anything, Lehman Brothers caused the credit freeze by overextending their assets, being generally irresponsible with money and creating a failure so large it panicked a lot of people.

The fact of the matter is that BitTorrent is already utilizing network resources more efficiently than simple HTTP transfers. The problem is that some network providers (particularly certain cable monopolists) have improperly designed their networks as being largely asymmetrical and have now painted themselves into a corner. They think that the solution to their congestion problems is to forcibly interfere with people's traffic, i.e., they want the buyout. They simply refuse to see that the majority of their problem is caused by the fact that they've misdesigned their network from the ground up. IP (Internet Protocol) is designed around the concept that all network peers are relatively equal, but when connections are heavily asymmetrical (as with most cablemodems) then network peers are not equal and that is why BitTorrent isn't the problem... Companies like Comcast designing networks that handle IP traffic poorly is the problem.

Why Richard Bennett is Wrong