It feels dirty to agree with an ISP on something. But even the worst corporations are on the right side of something from time to time I suppose.
They’re 100% only doing this for money, but still, nice to see them in the right for once.
A lot of it is the sheer bureaucracy of chasing down actual pirates and weeding them from people who just happen to be on the same IP address.
If one guy visiting an apartment block downloads a torrent from a public connection, what is ATT supposed to do? Shut down Internet to the entire building?
This is an undue burden for ISPs, even if the content isn’t living in a gray zone of legality.
Meanwhile, VPN providers be like “come on download stuff 😉😉😉”, wouldn’t that be a much easier case for them to prove willful disregard for piracy?
A day is going to come when the VPNs are going to be targeted for regulation.
It’s only a matter of time before someone shoots up a school with a 3D printed gun or Epstein’s a terabyte of child porn to a Senator’s office or some other silly bullshit, and then VPNs will become the whipping boy for our litany of problems.
Considering how many corporations rely on VPNs for their workers, I don’t think this would gain much traction.
A number of countries are experimenting with registration of VPNs and blocking of TOR traffic.
And there are more than a few VPN series that are explicitly or implicitly compromised by the security services in their own countries.
I wouldn’t try planning to do the next 9/11 on a ProtonVPN, for instance. The NSA is all over that shit.