This piece may be a reaction to the "Google Suggest" lawsuits in France.
Google has been sued several times in France because of Google Suggest. 1. Google your name. If you're actually a crook, Google Suggest results will expose you as such. 2. Sue Google for defamation. 3. Profit!
French courts have repeatedly sided against Google and with the crooks, err victims. Which shows how much such a provision is needed.
They are looking at P2P as a way to externalize their hosting costs. Yeepee, free bandwidth. But it's a pipe dream. First, because residential broadband connections are highly asymmetrical (i.e. upload speeds suck). Second, because the people onto which those costs are being externalized (ISPs and consumers) won't let them use their resources for free.
The truth is that the infrastructure is not there. If ISPs don't have a direct incentive to upgrade their infrastructure, Internet Video on Demand is not going to happen.
So, the only sensible way to make it happen is to pay ISPs for caching the files.
There are, however, two benefits in developing a dedicated P2P network. The first benefit is scalability. If the server is getting hammered with requests (very common with RSS feeds, as everyone tries to download the latest episode shortly after it is added), P2P spreads the damage. Second, there is a major benefit to using a dedicated P2P protocol "for authorized uses only": download services do get the benefits of P2P, and ISPs do get to throttle any other P2P protocol, and the content industry gets to say who's an insider and who's not. I suspect this is the compromise governments will push in the near future.
Hint: we'd better start offering an open-source network that does that before the MPAA does.
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Compressed air is a terrible way to store energy. There's about 250 times less energy in compressed air than in gasoline. Do the math. It's impossible to make a useable car that is powered solely by compressed air. The energy just isn't there.
It's possible, however, to make a working hybrid gasoline-compressed air vehicle. But as far as the hybrid component goes, batteries are a much better candidate.
The car in TFA is based on the MDI AirCar, which is a greener version of the Moller Skycar. In other words, a scam. Whenever the company needs money, they write a few press releases, and some naive investor falls for it.
The company has allegedly dozens of licensing deals all over the planet. But not a single production vehicle has been built. It was supposed to be coming out "real soon now" 10 years ago. In 10 more years, it will still be "right around the corner".
I'm afraid you're correct. Whether we use the traditional server-client method, or P2P, VoD takes too much data.
Some posters have already mentioned the need for caching. They're correct, but that's not enough. Caching does reduce the strain on the ISP network, but it does not incite ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure. Why would an ISP invest billions in better backbone access or in the last mile (FTTH), if the additional revenue goes somewhere else?
I believe that the current situation is the result of a pervasive "free lunch" mentality: everyone wants free money, free hosting, free content. But there is no such thing as a free lunch, or unlimited bandwidth for that matter.
I believe the only solution is an open hosting market. Let anyone that wants to host your files for the price you're willing to pay, do it. If your price is right, ISPs will rush to host your files. They will even invest in order to get more money from you. If you have limited resources, then you'll get slower service, because fewer people will accept to host your stuff. But that's fair. It's how most businesses work.
That requires a tamper-proof framework that makes sure that only authorized users get in, and that every uploader is guaranteed to be paid.
Disclaimer: I'm currently working on an open-source network that does just that (see sig). Feel free to join us, the more the merrier.;)
Fair enough. I'm advocating an (admittedly market-based) solution that revolves entirely around skipping the backbone in the first place, but you were too busy ranting to notice.
Bandwidth is not externalized. You and I and hosting providers all pay for bandwidth
We all pay something. But are we paying our fair share?
Whatever we do, we pay the same: "unlimited" (i.e. oversold), flat-rate has become the rule - even in some segments of the commercial hosting market. If we don't abuse the network, we're implicitely subsidizing someone who does. Of course, there is every incentive to externalize bandwidth onto the other customers of the same outfit!
Those offerings are just a modern variant of the commons. They all depend on people not being greedy. We both know how well that works.
Besides, many legal movie download services rely on peer-to-peer networking to reduce their hosting costs. Free hosting, yeah! Consumers just love those file-sharing agents that run 24/7, or they won't notice, or they won't care. At least it's what those companies appear to believe. How's that not externalizing?
The Internet is cracking at the seams because everyone wants a free lunch, that's why! But there is no such thing. It's just not an efficient way to allocate limited resources to meet insatiable demand.
What are you talking about. No one gets a free lunch. We already pay for the bandwith
Of course, we all pay something. But are we paying our fair share? Hard to tell. Whatever we do, we pay the same. If we don't abuse network resources, it implies we're subsidizing other people's uses that we don't necessarily approve of (e.g. spamming, heavy file sharing...).
Those "unlimited", flat-rate offerings are merely a modern variant of the commons. They depend on people not being greedy. We all know how well that works.;)
This is just a way for the telcos to legislate never having to upgrade and thus save themselves tons of cash by (what someone else already pointed out) reselling the same bandwith over and over instead of "building" more bandwith to meet demand. The reality is that if they reinvested money into their backend there would be fewer if any traffic issues QOS issues etc. They would attract more people to their faster better and improved service and we would all have the bandwith we need to get all the crap we do on the internet done.
Upgrading the last mile and local caching capacity is more efficient than upgrading access to the backbone. Local hosting means fewer middlemen.
Please, don't try to simplify everything down to free market solutions. The issue here is fraud and extortion, which are legal issues and require legal solutions.
Which is most likely to happen? That our wonderful legal system reins in rogues bandwidth providers, or that a free market solution emerges and makes the issue irrelevant?
I had no idea that bandwidth was a commons. All this time I was under the delusion that it was something that could be metered to the bit. I guess the internet it is more like the ocean than a series of tubes. That must be where the term surfing comes from.
<badanalogy> The fact that we are paying to get our waste disposed of does not mean it doesn't end up scattered across the commons. There are some bays you do NOT want to go surfing into!;) </badanalogy>
The current attack is not so much the ISPs, but the top Level ISPs and bandwidth providers.
It's all a scam orchestrated by the darkside to attempt to control the Internet.
I don't buy your conspiracy. Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence. I understand the reasons why existing players are resisting the transition to IPv6. But if the backbone was running out of IPv4 addresses, residential ISPs would just start NATing everyone, just as some of them already do.
Besides, don't top-level ISPs stand to make money if overall traffic increases, because they charge residential ISPs for bandwidth used? Whereas residential ISPs definitely stand to lose money if their customers start actually using their "unlimited" flat-rate connections as advertised...
Of course, I'm not an industry insider, so all that is my uninformed guess at best. Anyway, the Nemertes study claims that the backbone is not the problem, the last mile is. The conclusion of the study is that backbone capacity is to increase at the same pace as demand, whereas last-mile investment is to stagnate (which would basically kill the idea of HD video on demand).
Of course. Net neutrality must be defended. ISPs must not be allowed to decide what goes through their pipes. The best defense just happens to be: make it more profitable for ISPs to join us than to fight us.
This network is not about giving your ISP the right to slow your traffic to a crawl. It is about giving your ISP the opportunity to make your traffic go faster.
An interesting idea, but I don't know how well having each ISP host a copy of the entire internet would work. In the early 90's some ISPs experimented with keeping a cache of the most frequently visited sites (CNN, etc) to try to minimize bandwidth but the web quickly grew too large and diverse for this to be practical. How to do you keep a local copy of Google?
ISPs don't need to do that. They merely need to cache the most popular files. It is designed so that each ISP knows what's currently popular on its network. Depending on the price, the ISP then chooses to provide the hosting, to provide part of it, or to opt out.
Brilliant, indeed, to call "net neutrality" the end of the idea of net neutrality. I prefer to call Comcast's position "the assault on net neutrality", which it is.
While the current assault on net neutrality is a blatant money grab from ISPs, they do have a point. Content providers - especially those that rely on peer-to-peer networks - consider bandwidth as something that can be externalized. They are looking at ISPs, looking at their own customers, and see a free lunch waiting to be picked up.
History and economics prove that such an attitude leads to a non-optimal allocation of existing resource allocations, and removes incentives to invest into additional capacity. In a recent study, the Nemertes Research group warned that last-mile investment by ISPs was falling behind and would slow down adoption of HD content on the Internet.
The solution to the tragedy of the commons is the market. Only the market can achieve an optimal allocation of resources, and drive investment into additional capacity.
What the Internet needs is a marketplace for hosting capacity, supported by a universal network where:
content providers set the price they want to pay in exchange for hosting their traffic;
hosting providers decide at what price they accept to host the former's files;
hosting providers are guaranteed to be paid (i.e. investments have a predictable ROI).
That would pretty much make the "net neutrality" debate a moot issue. Content providers would enjoy lower hosting costs; consumers would enjoy faster downloads; ISPs would make money providing the bulk of the hosting (à la Usenet), instead of setting up roadblocks.
look at Itunes they charge a per upload ( on their side) charge of 99cents per file (how much of that actually helps pay to maintain their network is a good question).
I'm afraid there's a misunderstanding. The downloader is not charged for bandwith. The originating website is. You'd still be paying Apple 99 cents. The difference is that Apple, instead of paying 1 cent to Akamai, would pay any price Apple wants to pay to whomever actually provided the hosting. The necessary P2P software would be embedded in iTunes, so you would not notice where the file actually came from. However, keep iTunes running, and you'll definitely notice your store credit rise over time.
The problem with current file distribution methods is that don't make the best use of existing capacity, and don't provide incentives to expand capacity either. There is a lot of untapped capacity at ISPs and on consumers' computers. But they're not going to give it away for free (that goes for commercial P2P services such as Joost too).
Piracy exists because people feel that the content is not worth the price producers are asking as well as the restrictions of not actually owning the stuff you buy legally
It's not only a matter of price. It's not only a matter of annoying artificial restrictions (thankfully they are turning away from DRM at last). Piracy exists because right now, pirates offer a better product at a lower price, because downloading pirate products has no social stigma, and because pirate products are easily available everywhere.
On the other hand, people just love the free lunch, without thinking of the long-term consequences. CD prices have dropped 30-50% in the last 10 years. Yet many/.ers still complain, and head off to their favorite P2P network. iTunes prices songs at less than a dollar, but that's apparently still too much. If iTunes songs were sold at 20 cents, the same people would demand prices be slashed to 10 cents...
And yet, producers still deserve to get paid for their work. While I believe a self-production system might work for music, it's not going to happen for movies, at least not before machinima is visually competitive with in-the-flesh production. If they don't get paid, production will suffer.
That's why widespread copyright infringement is a scourge that must be defeated. And to achieve that, we must dry up pirate networks.
You can always conceal the size -- add extra information or break it into smaller messages.
Good luck trying to beat daily bandwidth caps. You may well be able to download one DVD image, but if your connection slows to a crawl for a week after that, you probably won't do it.
(downloads from "authorized" sites would be counted separately, of course)
That's a rather cynical view. I suggest that piracy is also "allowed" because there's no reasonable way of stopping it.
To get around any of these networks, all anybody has to do is encrypt their communications.
Hint: you can conceal the message, but you cannot conceal its size.
Want a proper connection? Upgrade to business class. Then the ISP won't care about your pirating. They're getting the extra money anyway.
How on earth are they going to filter traffic for copyright works and then, on top of that, figure out which are authorized works and which aren't?
It's pretty easy to figure out, if they are distributed over a "legit-only" network where each connection begins with a signed certificate from the originating website...
"Piracy" (copyright infringement) is only allowed to continue because it makes ISPs more money than the alternative.
ISPs know too well that without piracy, there would be little demand for expensive broadband connections. Of course, on the other hand, it has to be kept under control, lest it starts costing ISPs too much money.
Once legal alternatives become more profitable to ISPs, pirate networks will dry up overnight. The recent assault on net neutrality is an attempt to get there... making legal download service pay for "protection".
Yet, there is a more sensible way: the universal hosting marketplace. Imagine a P2P network where anyone can host files, and is guaranteed to be paid for each upload. ISPs could provide a large chunk of the capacity (à la Usenet), and make a bundle from that.
Give financial value to uploads, and the most active file sharers will view illegal file sharing as a financial loss. Similarly, piracy will become an observable, tangible loss to ISPs.
Until now, piracy was producers' problem. Give value to bandwidth, and it becomes everyone's problem.
Disclaimer: I am currently working on an open-source solution to achieve just that (see sig). Feel free to join us.;)
Blame the weak dollar
on
Where are Wii?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Price in the US: USD 249 Price in Europe: EUR 249
The profit margin is much higher in Europe (even after accounting for VAT). It makes sense to give priority to the countries where the profit margin is highest.
Another poster anticipated your reply, so I will keep it short.
There is plenty of demand for low-grade oil. If American oil companies refuse to upgrade their infrastructure, someone else will do it overseas. Canadian oil sands are selling like hotcakes. Somebody's got to refine it, somewhere. In China, for instance.
Dirty oil, just like evil foreign oil, is a fungible commodity.
Nonsense. You're confusing the price of crude oil and the price of gasoline in your argument.
Artificially reducing refinery capacity does reduce gasoline supply - which definitely increases the price of gasoline. BUT it also reduces the demand for crude oil - which lowers its price!
And yet, the price of crude oil not only has gone up, but it has gone up faster than gasoline prices this year (http://www.wtrg.com/daily/oilandgasspot.html). I suspect you might have to further refine your crude conspiracy theory.;)
It will never work, because ISPs won't accept losing 80% of their customers overnight.;)
The chairman of the "independent" government commission is the head of a brick-and-mortar music/movie retailer. How convenient that the official report recommends consumers be barred from patronizing online-based competitors, isn't it?
Thing is, widespread copyright infringement is allowed to continue only because it is more profitable to ISPs than the alternative. If the market is dominated by ISPs that are not owned by entertainment companies, the market will stick to the current "wink-wink" strategy. Fortunately, this is the case in France.
Strategies that focus on punishing the consumer are doomed to fail. The only efficient way is to make actively fighting copyright infringement more profitable to ISPs than aiding and abetting.
Slashdot Mirror
Latest case: Google sued (successfully) for having the gall to report a few celebrities of Jewish origin to be actually Jewish!
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/french-group-sues-because-google-suggest-thinks-jon-hamm-is-jewish/
This piece may be a reaction to the "Google Suggest" lawsuits in France.
Google has been sued several times in France because of Google Suggest.
1. Google your name. If you're actually a crook, Google Suggest results will expose you as such.
2. Sue Google for defamation.
3. Profit!
French courts have repeatedly sided against Google and with the crooks, err victims.
Which shows how much such a provision is needed.
The Godfather: Blackhand Edition? Made by EA by the way... and arguably one of the most fun games on the Wii.
They are looking at P2P as a way to externalize their hosting costs. Yeepee, free bandwidth. But it's a pipe dream. First, because residential broadband connections are highly asymmetrical (i.e. upload speeds suck). Second, because the people onto which those costs are being externalized (ISPs and consumers) won't let them use their resources for free.
The truth is that the infrastructure is not there. If ISPs don't have a direct incentive to upgrade their infrastructure, Internet Video on Demand is not going to happen.
So, the only sensible way to make it happen is to pay ISPs for caching the files.
There are, however, two benefits in developing a dedicated P2P network. The first benefit is scalability. If the server is getting hammered with requests (very common with RSS feeds, as everyone tries to download the latest episode shortly after it is added), P2P spreads the damage.
Second, there is a major benefit to using a dedicated P2P protocol "for authorized uses only": download services do get the benefits of P2P, and ISPs do get to throttle any other P2P protocol, and the content industry gets to say who's an insider and who's not. I suspect this is the compromise governments will push in the near future.
Hint: we'd better start offering an open-source network that does that before the MPAA does.
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Compressed air is a terrible way to store energy. There's about 250 times less energy in compressed air than in gasoline. Do the math. It's impossible to make a useable car that is powered solely by compressed air. The energy just isn't there.
It's possible, however, to make a working hybrid gasoline-compressed air vehicle. But as far as the hybrid component goes, batteries are a much better candidate.
The car in TFA is based on the MDI AirCar, which is a greener version of the Moller Skycar. In other words, a scam. Whenever the company needs money, they write a few press releases, and some naive investor falls for it.
The company has allegedly dozens of licensing deals all over the planet. But not a single production vehicle has been built. It was supposed to be coming out "real soon now" 10 years ago. In 10 more years, it will still be "right around the corner".
I'm afraid you're correct. Whether we use the traditional server-client method, or P2P, VoD takes too much data.
;)
Some posters have already mentioned the need for caching. They're correct, but that's not enough. Caching does reduce the strain on the ISP network, but it does not incite ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure. Why would an ISP invest billions in better backbone access or in the last mile (FTTH), if the additional revenue goes somewhere else?
I believe that the current situation is the result of a pervasive "free lunch" mentality: everyone wants free money, free hosting, free content. But there is no such thing as a free lunch, or unlimited bandwidth for that matter.
I believe the only solution is an open hosting market. Let anyone that wants to host your files for the price you're willing to pay, do it. If your price is right, ISPs will rush to host your files. They will even invest in order to get more money from you.
If you have limited resources, then you'll get slower service, because fewer people will accept to host your stuff. But that's fair. It's how most businesses work.
That requires a tamper-proof framework that makes sure that only authorized users get in, and that every uploader is guaranteed to be paid.
Disclaimer: I'm currently working on an open-source network that does just that (see sig). Feel free to join us, the more the merrier.
We all pay something. But are we paying our fair share?
Whatever we do, we pay the same: "unlimited" (i.e. oversold), flat-rate has become the rule - even in some segments of the commercial hosting market. If we don't abuse the network, we're implicitely subsidizing someone who does. Of course, there is every incentive to externalize bandwidth onto the other customers of the same outfit!
Those offerings are just a modern variant of the commons. They all depend on people not being greedy. We both know how well that works.
Besides, many legal movie download services rely on peer-to-peer networking to reduce their hosting costs. Free hosting, yeah! Consumers just love those file-sharing agents that run 24/7, or they won't notice, or they won't care. At least it's what those companies appear to believe. How's that not externalizing?
The Internet is cracking at the seams because everyone wants a free lunch, that's why! But there is no such thing. It's just not an efficient way to allocate limited resources to meet insatiable demand.
Of course, we all pay something. But are we paying our fair share? Hard to tell. Whatever we do, we pay the same. If we don't abuse network resources, it implies we're subsidizing other people's uses that we don't necessarily approve of (e.g. spamming, heavy file sharing...).
Those "unlimited", flat-rate offerings are merely a modern variant of the commons. They depend on people not being greedy. We all know how well that works.
Upgrading the last mile and local caching capacity is more efficient than upgrading access to the backbone. Local hosting means fewer middlemen.
Which is most likely to happen? That our wonderful legal system reins in rogues bandwidth providers, or that a free market solution emerges and makes the issue irrelevant?
I thought so.
<badanalogy>
The fact that we are paying to get our waste disposed of does not mean it doesn't end up scattered across the commons. There are some bays you do NOT want to go surfing into!
</badanalogy>
I don't buy your conspiracy. Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence. I understand the reasons why existing players are resisting the transition to IPv6. But if the backbone was running out of IPv4 addresses, residential ISPs would just start NATing everyone, just as some of them already do.
Besides, don't top-level ISPs stand to make money if overall traffic increases, because they charge residential ISPs for bandwidth used? Whereas residential ISPs definitely stand to lose money if their customers start actually using their "unlimited" flat-rate connections as advertised...
Of course, I'm not an industry insider, so all that is my uninformed guess at best. Anyway, the Nemertes study claims that the backbone is not the problem, the last mile is. The conclusion of the study is that backbone capacity is to increase at the same pace as demand, whereas last-mile investment is to stagnate (which would basically kill the idea of HD video on demand).
Of course. Net neutrality must be defended. ISPs must not be allowed to decide what goes through their pipes. The best defense just happens to be: make it more profitable for ISPs to join us than to fight us.
This network is not about giving your ISP the right to slow your traffic to a crawl. It is about giving your ISP the opportunity to make your traffic go faster.
ISPs don't need to do that. They merely need to cache the most popular files. It is designed so that each ISP knows what's currently popular on its network. Depending on the price, the ISP then chooses to provide the hosting, to provide part of it, or to opt out.
Brilliant, indeed, to call "net neutrality" the end of the idea of net neutrality. I prefer to call Comcast's position "the assault on net neutrality", which it is.
History and economics prove that such an attitude leads to a non-optimal allocation of existing resource allocations, and removes incentives to invest into additional capacity. In a recent study, the Nemertes Research group warned that last-mile investment by ISPs was falling behind and would slow down adoption of HD content on the Internet.
The solution to the tragedy of the commons is the market. Only the market can achieve an optimal allocation of resources, and drive investment into additional capacity.
What the Internet needs is a marketplace for hosting capacity, supported by a universal network where:
That would pretty much make the "net neutrality" debate a moot issue. Content providers would enjoy lower hosting costs; consumers would enjoy faster downloads; ISPs would make money providing the bulk of the hosting (à la Usenet), instead of setting up roadblocks.
I'm afraid there's a misunderstanding. The downloader is not charged for bandwith. The originating website is. You'd still be paying Apple 99 cents. The difference is that Apple, instead of paying 1 cent to Akamai, would pay any price Apple wants to pay to whomever actually provided the hosting. The necessary P2P software would be embedded in iTunes, so you would not notice where the file actually came from. However, keep iTunes running, and you'll definitely notice your store credit rise over time.
The problem with current file distribution methods is that don't make the best use of existing capacity, and don't provide incentives to expand capacity either. There is a lot of untapped capacity at ISPs and on consumers' computers. But they're not going to give it away for free (that goes for commercial P2P services such as Joost too).
Because of that, hosting costs remain high, download times are too long, bitrates suck, and last-mile investment is to remain stagnant.
It's not only a matter of price. It's not only a matter of annoying artificial restrictions (thankfully they are turning away from DRM at last). Piracy exists because right now, pirates offer a better product at a lower price, because downloading pirate products has no social stigma, and because pirate products are easily available everywhere.
On the other hand, people just love the free lunch, without thinking of the long-term consequences. CD prices have dropped 30-50% in the last 10 years. Yet many
And yet, producers still deserve to get paid for their work. While I believe a self-production system might work for music, it's not going to happen for movies, at least not before machinima is visually competitive with in-the-flesh production. If they don't get paid, production will suffer.
That's why widespread copyright infringement is a scourge that must be defeated. And to achieve that, we must dry up pirate networks.
Good luck trying to beat daily bandwidth caps. You may well be able to download one DVD image, but if your connection slows to a crawl for a week after that, you probably won't do it.
(downloads from "authorized" sites would be counted separately, of course)
Hint: you can conceal the message, but you cannot conceal its size.
Want a proper connection? Upgrade to business class. Then the ISP won't care about your pirating. They're getting the extra money anyway.
It's pretty easy to figure out, if they are distributed over a "legit-only" network where each connection begins with a signed certificate from the originating website...
"Piracy" (copyright infringement) is only allowed to continue because it makes ISPs more money than the alternative.
;)
ISPs know too well that without piracy, there would be little demand for expensive broadband connections. Of course, on the other hand, it has to be kept under control, lest it starts costing ISPs too much money.
Once legal alternatives become more profitable to ISPs, pirate networks will dry up overnight. The recent assault on net neutrality is an attempt to get there... making legal download service pay for "protection".
Yet, there is a more sensible way: the universal hosting marketplace. Imagine a P2P network where anyone can host files, and is guaranteed to be paid for each upload. ISPs could provide a large chunk of the capacity (à la Usenet), and make a bundle from that.
Give financial value to uploads, and the most active file sharers will view illegal file sharing as a financial loss. Similarly, piracy will become an observable, tangible loss to ISPs.
Until now, piracy was producers' problem. Give value to bandwidth, and it becomes everyone's problem.
Disclaimer: I am currently working on an open-source solution to achieve just that (see sig). Feel free to join us.
Price in the US: USD 249
Price in Europe: EUR 249
The profit margin is much higher in Europe (even after accounting for VAT). It makes sense to give priority to the countries where the profit margin is highest.
You can't kill botnets... ... but you can find a more profitable use of other people's bandwidth. It's simple economics.
Another poster anticipated your reply, so I will keep it short.
There is plenty of demand for low-grade oil. If American oil companies refuse to upgrade their infrastructure, someone else will do it overseas. Canadian oil sands are selling like hotcakes. Somebody's got to refine it, somewhere. In China, for instance.
Dirty oil, just like evil foreign oil, is a fungible commodity.
Nonsense. You're confusing the price of crude oil and the price of gasoline in your argument.
;)
Artificially reducing refinery capacity does reduce gasoline supply - which definitely increases the price of gasoline. BUT it also reduces the demand for crude oil - which lowers its price!
And yet, the price of crude oil not only has gone up, but it has gone up faster than gasoline prices this year (http://www.wtrg.com/daily/oilandgasspot.html). I suspect you might have to further refine your crude conspiracy theory.
It will never work, because ISPs won't accept losing 80% of their customers overnight. ;)
The chairman of the "independent" government commission is the head of a brick-and-mortar music/movie retailer. How convenient that the official report recommends consumers be barred from patronizing online-based competitors, isn't it?
Thing is, widespread copyright infringement is allowed to continue only because it is more profitable to ISPs than the alternative. If the market is dominated by ISPs that are not owned by entertainment companies, the market will stick to the current "wink-wink" strategy. Fortunately, this is the case in France.
Strategies that focus on punishing the consumer are doomed to fail. The only efficient way is to make actively fighting copyright infringement more profitable to ISPs than aiding and abetting.
It's sad, but it's true.