Ismail Sabri wants to block you from your ISP

We all know what P2P is. Most of us do use it, even if we won’t admit it. The lazy ones among us would perhaps pick a few DVDs off the fella who brings the albums to the mamak stall. But then, he too downloaded it and burnt it on a DVD for your convenience.

But now, Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob wants to make sure that if you do use P2P (or torrents as he says specifically), you would be blocked from your ISP. And he’s going to change the Copyright Act to allow that.

One would guess that this would be done through a master black list, kept most likely by MCMC, so you couldn’t sign up for service from another ISP once blocked. Of course, this will not do well for their other plans to have more Malaysians on the broadband trail.

Apparently, music industry revenues have dropped to RM57 million in 2008 from RM315 million in 1997. And quite obviously, the MDs of these companies are not pleased. After all, their year end bonuses and salaries are dependent on them meeting sales quotas. This definitely cannot do !

By demonizing bittorrent though, they are blaming a technology for what people do with it. That would be like making chairs illegal just because someone could throw it and kill someone.

In his myopia, the minister does not see that many companies and open source projects use bittorrent and P2P to distribute software releases. This not only saves the companies bandwidth, but also distributes the load as well as fosters a sense of community spirit around the distribution. People helping each other. Can’t be a bad thing now, can it ?

By spreading the download bandwidth among the downloaders, P2P evens out the network traffic on the internet. In fact, if our ISPs did not throttle or block P2P in Malaysia, they would actually see reduced usage of their expensive international transit links as most P2P protocols would pick a peer which is closer on the network. Download once, share domestically. Isn’t that a noble thought then ?

The benefits of P2P aside, the biggest concern most people are going to have is who will be doing the enforcement, and if there will be any fair trial of sorts ? If the burden is pushed to the ISPs, they may arbitrarily declare P2P usage, and give fair warning. After all, most conveniently use P2P as the reason for volume caps on their service. Do we trust the less than stellar technical competence in the ISPs then, for certainly this competence does not rest in the ministry nor MCMC at the moment.

Both the ministry and the minister fail to see that bittorrent and P2P can instead be put to better use. Flood it with legal content not otherwise available through normal channels. Independent film and music producers and directors have long faced barriers in getting their films to viewers, no thanks to the middlemen and channels which control the distribution chain now. Read: afore mentioned recording and movie companies. Releasing a film to be seeded on bittorrent is one such way of bypassing this control, and it is no wonder the MDs of these companies are worried. They do not want to lose their mojo in deciding what you and I get to see or hear.

Blocking P2P on the network or even banning P2P users from accessing the network is not going to work either. It would be trivially simple for people to utilize servers outside the country to download P2P content, and then hop it back into Malaysia using regular web or FTP connections. This would make the bandwidth asymmetry much worse in addition to making any such ban ineffective. Given the cost of internet access now, this scenario would possibly make it worse.

Reversing content download from outside the country is paramount, and P2P helps in that if used correctly. Banning the technology for what some people do on it is myopic, but instead we need to look at the real reasons why piracy happens and address those. The short and curly of it is that the content is just priced too high and people do not see the value in it. However, by giving viewers a better experience (saw Avatar in 3D didnt you ?), content producers can recover any revenue they may have lost. But innovation is important in achieving this.

One cannot keep shovelling the same drivel and expect the consumer to keep paying more for it. Nor blame a useful technology in order to retain control over a distribution system which has gone stale.

Information wants to be free !