How to Easily Stop Internet Piracy: Make People Pay for Bandwidth
In the last days there have been so many debates and threads about the PIPA/SOPA legislation. Sites went black (even Wikipedia), people added “STOP SOPA” banner on their avatars, and the technology news is overwhelmed with those messages. There are tons of people who say that this legislation will destroy the web, freedom of speech, and innovation.
While I do not have a particular position on the topic, I do think that there could be a much easier way for the government to stop Internet piracy, which does not require any form of censorship: obligate service provider to make people pay for bandwidth instead of a monthly flat rate, pretty much like they are already doing with cellphone data.
Let’s assume that normal Internet users use 50 Gb/month and currently pay $50/month for the service. That’s $1/Gb of bandwidth. If you do a lot of file sharing, you will definitely use more, and you’ll pay for it. After a while people will stop because it will become too expensive.
In theory, this should work just fine. One could argue that I could legally download/watch things on regular channels (e.g., Hulu, Amazon, …) and those will still be counted towards my bandwidth effectively increasing my bill. True, but I think we could find a fair amount of traffic which covers pretty much everybody. My hunch is that people who really contribute to Internet Piracy use way more bandwidth than regular people.
Another solution could be to have a list of sites which do not count toward the bandwidth. Unfortunately, this would be hard to regulate and check, while I can always look at my router’s traffic stats to check that my cable bill is right.
Finally, there could be a legislation that requires cable provider to report to the authorities statistics on the traffic of people who go above a certain monthly bandwidth. I am sure the entire process could be automated, including building up a system that automatically estimates the probability that the user is doing something illegal.
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