Comment Brilliant News - We need this. (Score 2) 77
File sharing technologies have been evolved to provide the maximum amount of convenience to as many users as possible. An inconvenient system results in too few users for a file share network to be sustainable. The goal of organisations is to reduce the number of users. The goal of sharers is to increase it.
The "Three Strikes Law" enabled organisations to state that they will catch people file-sharing and cut off their connection. We have to persuade users (most being non-technical) that the technology we produce to evade detection (encryption etc) keeps them safe. This is difficult when they are also being told it does not work by our opponent organisations.
This regulation against ISPs creates a technical problem without recrimination for solving it. It essentially results in an inability to trust the security and reliability of the network technologies at the lower end of the OSI model (controlled by the ISPs). This results in more inconvenience for the end user but no fear.
This plays straight to our hands. Not only are the developers of communication systems used to dealing with unreliable networks, we can now go to people with our tools (Tor,Free DNS etc), but instead of having to persuade them that it protects them from punishment, we just have to show them the tools remove their inconvenience - resulting in more users using encrypted file sharing technologies and tor.
As a bonus, we can help users hide and encrypt everything by default, creating a culture of protected information amongst ordinary people. This not only satisfies the goal by the file sharers, but also reduces the effectiveness of every other regime and organisation from governments down who want to censor the information people share.
If we play this right we will be telling our children we were there when we took away control of the internet.