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After Sweden's New Law, a Major Drop In Internet Traffic

Posted by timothy on from the back-to-corked-bottles dept.

iamnot writes "The new IPRED law came into effect in a big way in Sweden on April 1st. A news report has come out showing that internet traffic dropped by 30% from March 31st to April 1st. A lawyer from the Swedish anti-piracy agency was quoted as saying that the drop in traffic 'sends a very strong signal that the legislation works.' Is the new law, which allows for copyright holders to request the identification of people sharing files, truly curing people of their evil ways? Or perhaps it is just taking some time for Swedish downloaders to figure out the new IPREDator VPN system from The Pirate Bay."

9 of 337 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I'd like to see... by lordsilence · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here, go ahead:

    http://stats.autonomica.se/mrtg/sums_max/all_month_sum.png

    This is the monthly summarized statistics for netnod. Does indeed look like a big drop at April 1st and pretty stable usage before.

  2. 30% drop *in Sweden* by wilsoniya · · Score: 5, Informative

    not a 30% drop in all net traffic.

    From TFA: Internet use in Sweden dipped by 30 percent on Wednesday...

    --
    I can't remember the last time I forgot anything.
  3. Yeah, it works. by hyfe · · Score: 5, Informative
    Of course it works. In Norway there has been serious talks (like, not only nerds in basements) about not routing traffic through Sweden anymore. I don't know if anything came out of it, but I'm willing to bet it's affecting long-term plans on where to build pipelines.

    The bill doesn't just cover traffic to/from swedish households, it covers all traffic entering and leaving the country.

    --
    "" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
  4. Re:I'd like to see... by rolfc · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nope
    Look at

    http://stats.autonomica.se/mrtg/sums_max/all_year_sum.png

    All the talk about filesharing must have spread the word. They could just as well try to sell air. ;)

  5. Re:So your point is? by bigge111 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I disagree to some extent. It's in many cases not the "authors" who hate you for downloading the material. In England for example, 140 artists has organized to let their fans download their material peer-to-peer (artists including Radiohead, Peter Gabriel, Annie Lennox and Robbie Williams). As for Sweden, one of the most popular artists, Håkan Hellström, is used in the record companies arguments to forbid filesharing, when in fact Hellström himself at numerous occasions has said that he rather see people downloading his music for free than not beeing able to listen to him to the extent they want to. So freedom in this case is NOT turning against the artists or authors. (Writer Marcus Birro said in his radio program Karlavagnen that if people read you texts for free, then maybe you can do something else to earn your living, as long as you get the message out there. Like having your own radio show, perhaps?) I think the truth is that the record companies see a future where they are disposable. And if they continue to criminalize their onwn customers instead of adobting to the new techdriven "set of rules" in society, they will be. But it seems as for now they actually think it's more convinient to legislate than finding new business models.

  6. Re:They pull a knife, we pull a gun by Hannes+Eriksson · · Score: 5, Informative

    IANAL, but there is a passage in the swedish constitution regarding right of speech (yttrandefrihetsgrundlagen, SFS 1991:1469, which I re-read for this reason, just a few days ago) that prohibits laws being passed to outlaw equipment used for sending or receiving radio programmes or any form of recording of text, images and/or sound. It leaves a small hole for laws that require a license send things wirelessly, but is quite strict on things passing through wires.

    Banning VPNs or even torrents is as far as I can tell, against the swedish constitution.

    You can read it yourself here: http://www.riksdagen.se/templates/R_Page____6316.aspx

    Chapter 1, article 3 prevents banning ownership and usage, on grounds of content, of tools needed for reception and parsing a message intended for the general public.
    Chapter 3, article 10 would relate to ISP (common carrier) content filtering.

    Funny thing the swedish parliament has passed so many stupid laws in recent years, when the constitution contains so many Good articles!

    --
    Geek rants since like... 2000 or something.
  7. Re:I'd like to see... by skrolle2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You're looking at the bandwidth graph of all of Sweden, as measured by http://www.netnod.se/, not a single university.

    Also, if you look at the two-year graph, http://stats.autonomica.se/mrtg/sums/all_twoyear_sum.png, you can see that the drop now down to 90Gbps only means that we're back at the levels of October last year.

    Yeah, really effective, what a huge blow to filesharing in Sweden, how will it ever recover? Oh, let's wait half a year and it will definitely be back at the levels of late March again.

  8. Only a temporary effect by Thorwak · · Score: 4, Informative

    The same (short term drop in traffic) was seen in Finland (a neighbour country) when they implemented their IPRED1 law. A few months later however the traffic was back to "normal" again, and P2P traffic continue to rise.

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    Connection closed by foreign host.
  9. Re:Nothing will change. by relguj9 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Or people stopped browsing on April 1 because they realized every news article was a bs April fool's joke.