ISP Peer-To-Peer Piracy Filters: They Don't Work

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Internet service providers (ISPs) everywhere are feeling the pressure being put on by the entertainment industry who demand that they use products to filter out all P2P traffic. The filters would (in theory) block any and all access to file sharing for the service provider's customers.

The filters would accomplish two things. ISPs would no longer have A recent study was done to see how the filters work and how the ISPs felt about them. In short the study found that the filters are an embarrassment and don't even work.

TechDirt reports that the study asked 28 vendors to participate. Of the 28, 23 declined and 5 agreed. Of the 5 that took party only 2 would allow the results to be published because the other three did not like the results that were found.

Arbor/Ellacoya and Germany-based ipoque GmbH were the only ISPs to agree to allow the results to be publicized ,because those were the only vendors whose filters seemed to be able to detect and throttle most P2P protocols with any degree of reliability.

View the results chart at DSLreports.com.

One thing to note is that there is no mark on the chart that differentiates between legal and illegal P2P activity. This means that there must be no method in place that detects only copyright-protected P2P traffic which means that such a filter would block all file sharing completely. Even if you and your aunt were sharing home movies.

So what does the study show? InternetEvolution.com thinks that for one the absence of other vendors being wiling to share results speaks negatively of the P2P filtering market? It also proves that at this point it is still a very imperfect solution to the problem and could potentially cause as much harm as help.