I doubt this will happen, it'd be ridiculous. It'd be a clear attempt to prevent communication and freedom of speech.
The establishment really hates the internet because it makes it so hard to cover up things anymore. It exposes corruption and makes people able to get their own information on things and purchase what they want themselves instead of relying on what the government-controlled media and outlets give to them.
We all know it'd never work properly anyway. Civil rights groups would be (thankfully) up in arms about it. They get paid no matter what they do... might as well talk about controlling the internet as anything else.
Encryption would not have helped here. Comreg actually installed software that would monitor traffic to the trackers (which cannot be encrypted) and then they would spoof thousands of seeds on the tracker, so that anyone connecting a BT client through their network would not be talking to the real tracker but rather a virtual one that lived in Comreg's network and supplied the client with a ton of fake peers and seeds.
I'm impressed with the ingenuity of it but horrified by the implications for net neutrality.
Anything's a dildo if you're brave enough.
The Internet is the last bastion of free speech that the people of the world have. We should vigorously resist any attempts to regulate it. Far better to leave in all the bad stuff than regulate out all the good stuff along with it.
Absolutely my mousey friend!!
The thing that really really pisses me off about this is that the entire internet and the www (remember kids, they're not the same thing!) were founded on and could not have existed without a spirit of freedom and collaboration. TCP/IP and the DNS system which the internet is built on are open, freely available protocols developed in a massive international collaborative effort. When Tim Berners Lee developed the HTTP protocol (which the WWW is based upon) his first thought wasn't "wow, how can I monetise this", it was "right, let's get everyone hooked up to this schizzle".
The internet trundled away quite happily for decades, big business took absolutely no notice of it. Now that they've finally cottoned on to it, what's their first contribution? Regulation, policing, filtering.
Jeez, I remember in the 80's having to mow lawns and wash cars for 6 months to pay my dad back for a whopping phone bill because I was spending 12/13 hours a day connected to the UK's JANET network. There were of course no Irish numbers you could connect to so phone was permanently dialled into a UK number...
Anything's a dildo if you're brave enough.
There is no way in hell this would ever happen - the Irish economy relies heavily on the presence of internet giants like Google, Microsoft, Ebay, Paypal, Linkedin etc. any attempt at restricting internet freedom would not go down well with any of these companies and would put any other prospective investors right off - just look at what's going on at the moment with Google and China, Google have all but pulled out of China over the Chinese governments internet policy.