Cnet: Can Napster be Stopped? No!: Well, to pick nits, yes, Napster itself can be stopped, as it depends on central servers. Maybe you can't stop it but you can make it as hard to use as it is to find FTP servers with warez, which for someone who is not "in the loop" is quite hard. Gnutella, on the other hand, is virtually provably impossible to block. If the protocol becomes encrypted or compressed, then the data it sends will look just like any other encrypted or compressed data, and the only other clue will be the traffic pattern, which I doubt will remain unique to Gnutella as others come up with perfectly legitimate uses for that protocol, like massive distributed processing.