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Comment by pelorat | Hacker News Reader

This is just for show, because it's not actually preventing piracy, but I guess the commission can tell their lobbyist friends "look at what we did, please give us more money".

Also Gen Z that might at most have a laptop (for school), but spends most of their time on mobile devices are definately not pirating anything, nor do they know how to.

Anyone with some savviness will of course go on a private tracker or simply pay for access to one of the many usenet providers with 10+ years of retention.

Or just use a free DNS provider to negate the "block"

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> but spends most of their time on mobile devices are definately not pirating anything

I pirate books more through the browser on my phone than I do anywhere else. 10x as much as all other places combined is a conservative estimate.

Video and music is done on a desktop, though, sure.

I get my books through IRC still, makes me feel like a l33t h@x0r…

The European Commission is not funded by lobbyists. Unless of course you believe the EC members are corrupt.

> Unless of course you believe the EC members are corrupt.

That is exactly what many people believe.

Funnily scandals lately hit the EU Parliament, the only somewhat democratic body over there. See e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_...

It's a sort of landfill for shitty, unpopular in their home country politicians, too.

Usenet does not have any utility beyond piracy at this point, and hasn't for a long time.

If it ever becomes the primary method of piracy (granted, unlikely), it won't be any problem to simply ban the protocol/implementation. It's client-server, identifying the operators of those servers is trivial, and the legislation to allow the blocking will be uncontroversial and bipartisan.

Given that it's all pay-to-play, I doubt that it will turn into a game of whack-a-mole like it is with Z Library.

Bittorrent has a little more cover, in that one could make a case that it is used for legitimate purposes occasionally. But they'll probably just outlaw the VPNs that make it safe from litigation.

I don't think banning an entire protocol would go over nearly as well as you'd think.

If it's legal to ban usenet, then that'll get translated into banning encryption eventually. Right? It's a slippery slope at the very least.

Doesn't have to go over well. Just has to be effective. China does such shit, and maybe people there silently grumble. At least until the next grimace recognition software update starts dinging their social credit score.

Banning a protocol that is 100% used only for piracy will have not nearly enough sympathy among the public or the government for the solution to remain unimplemented. The only thing protecting it is that it's such a shitty protocol and so completely paywalled that most people don't want to use it. Should that ever change...

> If it ever becomes the primary method of piracy (granted, unlikely), it won't be any problem to simply ban the protocol/implementation.

Many Usenet providers offer their NNTP protocol through TLS on port 443.

If you "simply" block all TLS connections on port 443 some other things might break on the internet.

Could this be detected with deep packet inspection?

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