Comment by lstamour | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lstamour | Hacker News Reader

It’s funny, if you had told me this was going to be introduced when DMCA was, I would have said Canadians would literally switch ISPs in order to avoid this.

Now, I’m not so sure. Content blocking on YouTube and the occasional DMCA takedown notice on a Google web search tend to be the only hints you get of piracy online.

Most people used to pirate all kinds of media, now we’ve Spotify and YouTube and Netflix and Disney+, etc. It’s never been easier to skip the physical disc and listen or watch media for free.

That said, I could see unintended consequences. For example, this might be intended for piracy but we should keep in mind that our ISPs are often the ones owning significant media properties in Canada.

Imagine Bell Canada getting the green light to block piracy services and deciding that any service which lets you watch content internationally, such as a VPN service, should be blocked in Canada and the content along with it?

At what point would ISPs interpret this as a way to protect their IP-based business models?

And at what point might the system open up to DMCA or YouTube style content strikes vs proper determination of copyright infringement. I’d be furious if GitHub repos started disappearing when tools, especially for education, are distinct from copyrighted materials being shared.

I could even imagine a future where adblockers are considered copyright infringement because they modify the page or stream that the rights holder intended to serve. Once you allow ISPs to meddle with traffic on their own, they might not know where to stop, given a few decades.

This is always the main problem with these things. It sounds like a small and maybe even could be argued as a "fair" set of regulations/laws to propose, but the problem is that it opens up the box and often the line of where it stops starts to get fuzzy. Rogers and Bell are ISPs, cable/satelite providers, phone providers, control most of the major news networks (on radio and tv) as well as produce a lot of content and own streaming services.

They are overall incredibly biased against illegal content online and have a huge stake in that. I don't think it makes sense for the same company who produces content and controls a lot of the media to also be the ones blocking "pirate" content.

I wonder how this works with the ISP's that buy internet access wholesale from Bell and Rogers. For example my ISP is pretty small and I don't even think they forward those intimidating letters from production studios nor do I think they would care to enforce random IPs/sites to block. They are just too small of an operation to care/worry about this and wasting money on it. So will Bell and Rogers end up just blocking it on their end and not even giving these wholesale buyers a chance to manage the network?

Overall I really do not trust Bell or Rogers and I do not trust them with blocking things. I really do not want to have to end up using a VPN connected to another country all the time simply to avoid blockades all over the web.

Overall I feel like this just opens the box to further blocking of things not specifically piracy related. You give the government/ISP's a CM and they are going to ask for a meter later.

Just a note, I don’t think there are many Canadian small ISPs which buy internet access wholesale in order to resell it. There are many who lease “last-mile” connectivity from both as Bell, Rogers and Co as owners of the copper they are required to provide that, but it’s not in their interest to sell wholesale internet access to a competitor. You will hit an IP network device of your own ISP first and never be on on an internet routable segment of Bell/Rogers so its unlikely they would be able to block other kinds of encapsulated traffic (assuming the agreement even allows that, which also seems unlikely). If you are a small ISP, you have much better options for transit than Bell or Rogers at that point.

Over here in Russia, piracy is still the default for many people. Why would you go out of your way to pay for something if you could get the same exact thing for free and without DRM? Yes, some people do go out of their way to pay for streaming because they "want to support the author". The majority does not.

True. And folks here still set up Android boxes for international packages, sports streaming, watching TV shows immediately after they air, etc.

But it's a lot less frequent. I can't imagine as many people would use BitTorrent to download MP3s now that YouTube and Spotify can stream songs for free, for example. Even back in the era of P2P downloading, I would often listen to free streaming online radio stations because it was easier than having to make a playlist. Playlist quality, for example, can win out over piracy for folks who've tried AI recommendations from Spotify.

I do agree though, the UX of pirated material can sometimes be much higher. For example, some services force ads even after you pay them (Hulu, cable TV) and other ads are completely un-skippable (Blu-Ray trailers).

But I'd maintain that "the exact same thing for free" often isn't entirely free, and that at scale, industry can offer services that are higher quality than that of piracy at a competitive price and with less risk. They could, they just often don't.

And I'd point out there's a minimum age and computer-awareness to use piracy services. Someone has to help you set it up, for example, help you understand what's good or not. Perhaps even filter content for you.

By comparison, I can pay $X per year to Disney+ and know that whatever the kids watch is quality content and they know how to navigate the interface. It works roughly as well on cheap Android tablets and TV sticks as it does in a more expensive computer browser.

That said, even piracy can be paid, rather than free. People pay for VPNs, they pay for Usenet servers, or sometimes cloud bittorrent services, or faster downloads on file hosting sites. People even pay for piracy with their time, waiting or finding or setting up their content to download.

I can easily imagine that in the right climate, pirate services spring up to make it easier to watch content without caring about where it came from. You see this today with alternative app stores for example. Even legitimate paid services like Crunchyroll and YouTube were started at first by uploads of pirated content with better UX on top.

Commerce is everywhere, ultimately people pay what they want to pay and pick and choose the experience they prefer, I think... as long as DRM and device lockdowns and -- as we're talking about here, internet firewalls -- allow for such innovation, of course.

> Most people used to pirate all kinds of media, now we’ve Spotify and YouTube and Netflix and Disney+, etc. It’s never been easier to skip the physical disc and listen or watch media for free.

Such services are not free apart from YT but even YT charges you if you want to wztch movies.

Spotify has a free tier. Netflix and Disney+ are far cheaper than their cable equivalents, and while they don't have free trials, they can be shared with enough people as to be effectively free at scale. Cheaper than a coffee per user per month, say.

I do agree though, the digital divide these days is not whether you have Internet but rather how many services you have and how expensive your monthly bills are compared to food and rent, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com