Business secretary Peter Mandelson's decision
toforce internet service providers to introduce technical
measures to combat music, video and software piracybegs a question: will it work?
James Blessing, a consultant to smaller ISPs and
ISPA council member, says
obtaining proof that files are being illegally shared is
difficult.
Each message is broken into packets or envelopes of data and
each may be sent via a different route to its destination where
they are reassembled into a coherent message.
It is fairly easy for ISPs to identify peer-to-peer traffic
using protocol analysers. Doing anything about it is problematic.
"You can't just block P2P because you break legitimate traffic,"
Blessing says.
This means ISPs will have to open up the packets to see what
content they contain. Three problems arise. One is that ISPs have
no way of knowing whether the music or video file they find is
being transmitted legitimately, or even if the ones and zeros are
music, video or even spam.
Rights holders could put a kind of digital watermark on the
content that would indicate what is legitimate, but they show no
signs of doing so, says Blessing.
Second, the best content inspection appliances are about 80%
effective at 400Mbps, and many ISPs have throughputs of 10Gbps or
more. They would each need at least 25 such appliances to monitor
their present traffic, let alone cope with the jump in traffic
volumes that a 2Mbps universal service might bring.
"This is an engineering problem," Blessing says. "ISPs can split
their traffic (for inspection), but that's inefficient and will
raise costs, or they can wait for the engineers to build faster
appliances."
Third, if the content is encrypted, as it is with Skype, ISPs
can't read it at all. Francisco Mingorance, senior director for
public policy for the Business Software
Alliance (BSA) Europe, says encryption services are available
to file-sharers for $5 a month.
Content filtering risks stopping or holding up legitimate use of
file-sharing networks, and content inspection at the very least
means messages will take longer to get to their destination, he
says.
But ISPs want content owners to provide evidence of such quality
that it will stand up in court, says Blessing. Much of the evidence
that comes to them is incomplete at best, he says.
Getting solid evidence of wrong-doing is costly, and the return
on investment barely justifiable, says John Lovelock, chief
executive of the Federation
Against Software Theft (FAST). It cost FAST £135,000 to sue
just one infringer. The £3,500 fine levied was 100 times the cost
of the stolen software, and the thief could pay it back in his own
time, if ever, he says.
Kevin Peel, CEO of 4theNet, a
Sussex internet service provider with both business and consumer
clients, says the existing system of notification and takedown
works well. "The rights holders tell us which of our customers is
infringing, we send them an e-mail, and usually they apologise and
remove the offending material at once," he says.
If the government is to pursue its proposals, it will have to be
on a cost-recovery basis, Blessing says. Many smaller ISPs already
subsist on gross margins of 50p per connection per month, he says.
Any extra unrecoverable cost will put them out of business.
Blessing rejected the idea that the cost could be passed on to
customers. Smaller ISPs are already losing customers to the bigger
players that can offer packages that include fixed line telephony
and TV as well as broadband.
The technical problems of accommodating the government's
proposals boil down to engineering, cost and a willingness to
reduce the amount of competition in the ISP market. If these could
be solved, would they work?
It is unlikely that the draconian measures proposed by Mandelson
will have the desired effect. It is more likely that they will
encourage persistent illegal file sharers to use encryption,
anonymising networks and other technical measures to evade
policing.