Further news on the Situation in NZ, a few days old but I feel a topic many of you will wish to read about.
http://www.p2pon.com/2011/09/08/traffic-goes-down-in-new-zealand-after-three-strikes%e2%80%99-implementation/Consequences of the three strikes law introduced by New Zealand a week ago are starting to show up. Already two of the country’s largest ISPs, Orcon and TelstraClear, have reported a significant drop in traffic caused, most likely, by the fear of the harsh file-sharing fines (up to NZ$15,000) and Internet disconnections.
According to Orcon during this last week international traffic into New Zealand went down by about 10 percent. In an interview with the New Zealand Herald, Orcon’s chief executive Scott Bartlett pointed out that p2p file sharing comes right after video streaming as the largest source of online traffic.
As usual when such laws are mentioned anywhere in the globe the copyright extremists rub their hands and see initially a drop in traffic but unfortunately not a hike in profits from their often overpriced offerings. Perhaps theres a lesson in there about setting reasonable rates for what is after all mainly now non physical content, surely its preferable to have happy consumers in their tens of millions each paying 5 dollars than a few hundred thousand paying 30 dollars for the latest video release, online content does not after all have much cost associated with it after financing a few servers to ensure decent delivery of content, unfortunately it seems the media cartels has missed the bus and these new sets of legislation are simply sour grapes efforts to extort revenues for what are poor offerings at expensive retail prices, nothing changes it seems.