Telstra Kicking Off Voluntary Filter Trials, Seeking Volunteers - Gizmodo Australia
Telstra is kicking off trials of its new deep packet inspection set up aimed at throttling bittorrent traffic through its network to combat piracy. I guess it sounds great to commercial partners however there may just be a few points they haven't fully considered...
Not all bittorrent style traffic is piracy.
Bittorrent uses a peer to peer (p2p) network which means that large files can be shared with a large number of people in such a way that you can download parts of the file from anybody else connected to it. The knock on effect means that money can be saved by reducing, or even eliminating, the need to have a large server setup to host files and send them out on demand. While this makes it a very efficient way to share the latest hollywood blockbuster it also means that a number of companies use this same technique to send out large updates and even to communicate between clients. Prime examples include Blizzard with World of Warcraft and the Call of Duty franchise.
The Humble Indie Bundle, a very popular charity service, also prefers users to make use of bittorrent links since that saves them considerable amounts of server space meaning more money can go to charity.
Open source and freeware programs are also big on p2p distribution. Alternative operating system Linux is arguably the most shared legal download via bittorrent and there are many other applications and games where the developer is not getting any income from their work for the pure reason that they want to share their software with the world. Does Telstra expect these developers to pay for server space so they can continue to distribute their software?
Most bittorrent clients have an option to encrypt traffic.
Simply this means with a click of a tick box the p2p traffic being sent by your client looks like normal internet data. You see this isn't the first time an ISP has tried to limit bittorrent traffic so, funnily enough, there are quite sophisticated methods that can get around this kind of filtering which ultimately make this kind of restriction a pointless exercise and a waste of money.
Not all piracy is via bittorrent.
With all the focus bittorrent receives you'd be hard pressed to think anything else existed. The ease of use has made it a very popular method for piracy, but it has also made it the biggest target. It is also the easiest to monitor. Of course prior to the rise of p2p there were private networks, TOR, cloud storage, direct downloads and usenet and, guess what, these options are still in use and, much like p2p, they also have legitimate legal uses.
The only way to effectively test this system is to encourage piracy.
To see if their fancy deep packet inspection will effectively limit p2p traffic on their network Telstra needs a large number of volunteers to actively use p2p and as the aim is to stop piracy then, by extension, they need people who will try to pirate as much as possible. Now if you are a heavy p2p user on the Telstra network, whether for legitimate or copyright infringing purposes, it seems very unlikely that you would actively volunteer to have your internet experience crippled. And if Telstra does manage to get a large contingent of merry pirates testing the limits then they may get in trouble with copyright holders for "encouraging illicit activity" during the trial.
It won't make any difference.
Ultimately should the trial be considered a success and all Telstra users get their packets deeply inspected those who want to download will still download. Any filtering can be bypassed and a quick Google search will give even inexperienced users easy to follow step by step instructions. Data encryption, Virtual Private Networks, even swapping to the freely available Google DNS service can bypass all sorts of restrictions and that is just the tip of the iceberg.
So what can be done?
The fact that the focus of this trial is anti-piracy can easily lead us to the conclusion that it has come at the insistence of copyright owners. These companies need to stop expecting everyone else to police their content and actually have a look at the real problem. The fact that
Netflix now accounts for more traffic in North America than bittorrent while other areas without access to cheap content filled services (such as the Asia-Pacific region) show three times as much p2p traffic should be a pretty strong indication of where they should be focusing their efforts. Instead they continue to try to lock content away to maximise profit in multiple markets and expect the consumer to pay hugely varied prices depending on where in the world they live.
Instead of trying to limit the internet try making the content accessible and affordable. It won't stop piracy but it will significantly reduce it.
