Swedish Internet traffic measurement firm says it fell from almost 200Gbs to 110Gbs on the day the new law came into effect.
Swedes are apparently scaling back their Internet usage after that country’s controversial new copyright law went into effect last Wednesday.
The new law, if you recall, allows copyright holders to seek a court order requiring ISPs to divulge the names of accused file-sharers.
After going into effect, Netnod Internet Exchange, an Internet traffic measurement firm, reported that Internet traffic in that country by almost one half, dropping from almost 200Gbps to 110Gbps on the day the new law came into effect.
One Swedish ISP is not pleased with the drop and I’m sure he’s not alone.
“Half the Internet is gone,” said Jon Karlung, chief executive of Banhof. “If this pattern keeps up, it means the extensive broadband network we’ve built will lose its significance.”
Sweden is, or was, one of Europe’s most Internet-enabled countries.
Not surprisingly, Anti-Piracy Agency lawyer Henrik Pontén was actually pleased to see the plunge in traffic.
“The majority of all Internet traffic is file sharing, which is why nothing other than the new IPRED law can explain this major drop in traffic,” he told Metro. “This sends a very strong signal that the legislation works.”
Swedish Party vice-chairman Christian Engstrom played down the data and predicts the drop is only temporary.
“Today, there is a very drastic reduction in internet traffic,” he told the BBC. “But experience from other countries suggests that while file-sharing drops on the day a law is passed, it starts climbing again. One of the reasons is that it takes people a few weeks to figure out how to change their security settings so that they can share files anonymously.”
Perhaps the Pirate Bay’s new VPN service couldn’t come at a better time.
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I suspect the amount of traffic will return once the people find their ways around this predicament.
http://stats.autonomica.se/mrtg/sums/all_year_sum.png
As you can clearly see, traffic just fell back to the level it was around july!
So IPFI didn’t really win, they just caused everyone to d/l as crazy between July/March.
Really ZP, I’m a bit disappointed with you now.
Even scrolling a bit lower down on the page would have shown that…
I predict a spike in proxies, anonymous clients, and other such services propping up in and around Sweden.
@Vox
Scroll down even further and you’ll see the 2 year graph, which considers traffic well before the copyright law was even considered. Aggregate traffic has been steadily increasing for the last 2 years. You could argue that the traffic increase from between when the law was proposed (Sep’08) and when it was actually enacted (Apr’09) was due to people downloading as much as they could to avoid getting in trouble, but that would ignore the reasons for the traffic increase prior to when the law was first proposed.
http://stats.autonomica.se/mrtg/sums/all_twoyear_sum.png
The interwebs never slumbers for long
@soulxtc
True that.
I hear that TPB got a lot more users since their servers got seized, (publicity and all that). That might explain the more long term rise in internet traffic. Then again, maybe it’s just general upgrades in broadband capacity. Who knows.
I doubt this new law will permanently stop any illegal downloading. Someone will surely find a way to disguise the downloads to avoid detection.
They should just have this law taken out of effect. There are gonna be tons of people braking it.
Here is headline from another site, which may indicate of just where things are heading and what we may see more in future..lol
“Miramax Rewards Would-Be BitTorrent Pirate With Free Ticket”