ISPs get legal notices from companies and are liable if it is found that their users are downloading illegal torrents and they don’t take action against those users.

How are VPNs any different? By using a VPN, aren’t you essentially transferring your accountability to the VPN provider? Wouldn’t courts find that since this or that VPN service’s exit server was used in ____ illegal online activity, they’re responsible and must cease operations?

How do VPNs operate? Are laws different for them? If yes, then how does that benefit the state? Wouldn’t the state benefit from treating VPNs the same as ISPs so they get more control?

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      16·
      1 month ago

      those users are using a lot of bandwidth and the piracy forms a handy excuse.

      Or they could improve their network for torrenting like some Indian ISPs did in the past

      Several Internet providers in India have found a clever way to reduce the load BitTorrent transfers put on their network, […] They’ve teamed up with Torbox.net which offers a fully fledged torrent search engine that connects users to ‘local’ peers to guarantee maximum download speeds.

      Some [ISPs] have had their own custom ‘caching’ setups but increasingly they are teaming up with the torrent search engine Torbox.

      Torbox links them to peers in the local network, which means that the traffic is free for the ISP.

      Most people who visit Torbox will see a notice that their ISP doesn’t have a peering agreement. However, for those who have a supporting ISP the torrent site returns search results ordering torrents based on the proximity of downloaders.

      TorrentFreak spoke with EBS director Victor Francess, who says that with this setup most torrent data is served from within the ISP’s own network.

      “It all creates a very powerful user experience, so in fact just about 10-20% of all torrent traffic comes from the upstream and everything else is local,” Francess says.

    • refalo@programming.dev
      2·
      1 month ago

      Even if Section 230 didn’t require providers to terminate the user’s service, providers further upstream could technically punish that ISP for breaking their own ToS depending on what it is.

      People like Liz Fong-Jones and Keffals have successfully lobbied multiple Tier 1 ISPs to blackhole websites that have posted information about them that they didn’t like based on this fact, behavior which the EFF has specifically called out as a threat to the free and open Internet. Even the CEO of Cloudflare has openly admitted to being personally involved in blocking sites without a really good reason.