Earlier this week I had the opportunity for long discussions with Jonas Birgersson, the founder of Via Europa and Labs 2 in Sweden, FTTH pioneer and free internet advocate. A lesser known fact about Jonas is that he has a grounding in military studies. As he says himself, he tends to analyse conflict using the skillset he acquired there, and discussion with him often goes in unexpected directions as a result (ask him about pigs and antibiotics one day...)
Anyway, one of the topics we discussed was the current European legislative regime tightening around copyright. I didn't expect Jonas to be a lover of Albanel, and indeed his profound distate of DPI confirms this. The more interesting thing (to me) is that he sees the current situation in a way similar to how I see it, but with a conflict analysis twist to it.
My take on the recent thurst in France to enforce DPI upon ISPs and require of them to report copyright infringement as well as the so-called proportionate response scheme has been expressed here in the past. The most likely outcome will be a mass generalisation of VPNs and encryption, with an immediate result that not only will piracy not abate, but the potentially legitimate uses of snooping for national security or serious crime fighting will become all that harder, not to say impossible. Another effect will be to seriously limit the commercial potential of DPI in designing more intelligent and customer-tailored offers and traffic shaping.
Jonas' take is similar in its results but analysed with his background it sounds a little like this: conflict escalation should always be envisaged when you launch an offensive, and the art of warfare is often to anticipate the most powerful weapon your opponent may use to respond. If you ascertain that the use of that weapon will win him the war, then your move is inconsiderate.
Porponents of this piracy war, French minister of culture first and foremost say that it won't eradicate piracy, but it will push it at the fringes, to savvy users. It won't. Anyone who has installed a VPN on his PC knows how easy it is. Open an email attachment, enter a couple of variables in the client, and done. Less than a minute and DPI can't penetrate your traffic anymore. Anyone even remotely close to the Industry knows this.
So why doesn't my illustrious minister of culture? Because she doesn't know or understand what a VPN is, what encryption is, how P2P works. And since she doesn't understand, it must be complicated. And since she's a minister and the rest of France isn't, she's more intelligent. So if she finds it complicated, imagine how terribly unfathomable it must be for all the stupid crim... people who routinely pillage record comp... artists!
As Jonas was saying, installing encryption costs close to nothing. Decrypting it costs zillions. How stupid are these people who govern us?
