Everyone has got file sharing wrong
December 7, 2009
Mandleson’s Digital Economy bill had it’s second reading in the Lords last week and I watched the debate with (vested) interest. Three things became rapidly apparently.
1. Mandleson is an idiot (this I knew already)
2. Some of the Lords are actually pretty clued up as to what the internet is and how it works
3. They’re all wrong
There were some good points made, and most of the comments reflected the need that to stop the piracy in the first place, viable alternatives must be available – it’s unfair to criminalise someone downloading a classic track he can’t buy on-line, or indeed in his local record store. There’s no Al Frankens (American Senator – see his response to a letter from a voter on the subject of net neutrality here) amongst them, but they weren’t a total disgrace.
So, ignoring the controversial “Henry VIII” Clause 17 (which fortunately seems likely to get killed) that gives the Secretary of State powers to re-write large amounts of the copyright act to suit whoever he wants, Clause 11 is the one that I want to talk rant about.
It allows the Secretary of State to require ISP’s to impose “technical measures” on customers meeting certain criteria, basically disconnections, P2P blocking or who knows what else. This is effectively giving him (or her) the ability to effectively redesign an ISP’s core network which they’ve invested potentially millions of pounds in. Well, that sounds like a good way to kill an industry doesn’t it?
So on one hand you’ve got the Government with their Digital Britain report saying how they’re going to grant universal access to the Internet because it’s a really important thing, and on the other hand they’re trying force ISP’s to disconnect anyone who participates in file sharing which, let’s be honest, is a huge proportion of UK internet users.
Making it the ISP’s problem won’t work though – your service provider is not the police, they don’t have the power to enforce the law and they’re no more responsible for you downloading the latest Harry Potter than Audi are if you take your R8 down the M1 at 155mph. So why are the Government trying to make the Internet Service Providers liable? It’s simple – trying to take action against all the individuals participating in file sharing would result in a large proportion of the UK’s population being criminalised, and that doesn’t win votes. Get the ISP’s to be the bad guys though, and the Government get to keep their pals in the recording and film industries happy by decreasing piracy and the populace don’t vote in a new set of politicians.
What people seem to be forgetting is that ISP’s don’t actually really want P2P traffic on their networks and have been actively trying to kill file-sharing themselves for years, without any kind of success. If the consumer who downloads an album for free is ripping off the record label, it’s the ISP that’s paying for it.
You see, the bandwidth that you used to download the album costs money. Yes, you pay your internet subscription but that’s based on the probability that you won’t be using your connection at it’s maximum all the time. This is called contention, and you can think of it as sharing your connection – average ratios are 50:1, so for every 50 people with a 16mb ADSL connection (800Mb total), there’s really only 16Mb actually available. And once you start downloading stuff on P2P, it can saturate your connection for long periods of time, causing the 16Mb that’s available to the 50 people to be hogged by you. And if someone else on your contention pool does it, and another person, that really starts to slow things down. And when broadband gets slow, customers complain – the only option the ISP has is to get more bandwidth (which costs money), or stop you from using P2P sites.
Which do you think they want to do?
The bottom line is rather than work against the ISP’s, the government should be working with them, trying to find a solution that works for all parties, not enacting draconian laws to enforce the will of the rights holders on a separate, and unrelated, industry.
