Considering that recent¹ news keep hinting at how the MAFIAA and company want to push responsibility for file sharing onto ISPs, let’s muse over a few possible outcomes.

ISPs start pushing back. Customers don’t like snooping and definitely don’t like filtering of what they can or cannot do online. Customers leave ISPs and cause them significant financial trouble. I am surprised at how many people do get, eventually, up in arms about something like this. “Your provider is sniffing you connection” doesn’t amount to the same reaction as “Your provider is wiretapping what you do because the corporate-run government told it to; who knows what’s next” gets to mostly everybody.

ISPs know what the cost of deploying this kind of infrastructure can be like. QoS decays from packet filtering/inspection and most of the hardcore file-sharers² won’t be filtered out anyway. Everyone else suffers from poor distribution, including big media. Google starts pushing, maybe they finally become an ISP as well.

Enterprising hackers develop tainted packets that fuck up filtering mechanisms. ISPs employ hackers and there are many people friendly to the cause inside their ranks. How long till the spec is leaked to the Pirate Bay? And then, an overhaul? More money, same outcome.

BitTorrent protocol headers start becoming masked as something else³ and filtering will do little to stop them.

And then there’s shareboards, darknets, ftp drops, rapidshare clones etc

The only way the MAFIAA can win this is if they make everyone go back to 56k dial-up - but, actually, not even then =)

1. Well, they were far more recent when I drafted this entry [↩]
2. Which can be mostly anyone with a decent bittorrent client and the ability to read a set-up guide [↩]
3. It should be theoretically possible to use steganography for headers, masquerading them as legitimate video content [↩]