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An odd article from an Australian perspective.

The bulk of Australian ISPs already "DNS Block" pirate sites and have done so for a decade or more.

In lay terms they provide a default IP address phone book with a slew of missing names and many Australian users simply use Google | CloudFlare | Other DNS providers with nary a hiccup.

The meat of the article is about what "Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Warner, local studio Village Roadshow, plus cinema groups and distributors" want from the Australian Government over and above what it already does.

Eg:

> There are additional proposals in the combined submissions but the key recommendations are as follows:

> ..

> Allow rightsholders to obtain customer data for enforcement purposes

That's the big one.

That's also going to require the reversal of a prior Australian High Court Decision:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadshow_Films_Pty_Ltd_v_iiNet...

In brief:

> The alliance of 34 companies ( aka AFACT ) unsuccessfully claimed that iiNet authorised primary copyright infringement by failing to take reasonable steps to prevent its customers from downloading and sharing infringing copies of films and television programs using BitTorrent.

with the result:

> The court found that AFACT had misled the court in regard to the number of infringing users, and, while iiNet users did infringe, this was not the responsibility of iiNet to deal with:

iiNet is not responsible if an iiNet user uses that system to bring about copyright infringement ... the law recognises no positive obligation on any person to protect the copyright of another

It's been established that Australian ISPs are not legally required to cough up customer data to outsiders.

The work around would be for the US based media companies to take over Australian ISPs . . .

To be honest, an internet censorship regime feels like an increasingly inevitable part of the future right now. It will either be about preventing copyright infringement, misinformation, inappropriate content, widespread cyberattacks, preventing harassment, or controlling AI-generated content; take your pick, or mix and match. So much so, that rather than trying to maintain the current status quo where the internet is mostly "free," I would be in favor of passing a law with some censorship in it if it had extremely strict safeguards, legal processes, and minimally-biased enforcement rather than letting some random court make the law for me. Or worse, because we won't budge, letting lawmakers create bills like EARN IT that go too far the other way.

As for the alternatives: Bitcoin, IPFS? I have very little hope. The US DOJ has shown that Bitcoin is anything but private, it's probably even easier to trace than actual cash at times. IPFS? Well, let's just say they allegedly have a list of "bad hashes" that they quietly report to law enforcement for anyone asking for them on their main gateway. Monero might be private... but, well, all they have to do is pass a law saying "anyone who uses Monero for any purpose is automatically presumed guilty for 5 years imprisonment", as well as require ISPs to log and report Monero traffic, and that's the end of that.

As for "we can always use VPNs?" Well... China (basically) banned them successfully, India (basically) banned them successfully, and your ISP always knows if you are using a VPN and where you are logging into. A VPN ban if crap really hit the fan wouldn't be that difficult. As for Tor, well, do you really trust the US Government who built it and no doubt has wiretaps on the lines for what goes in and comes out? ;)

"I would be in favor of passing a law with some censorship in it if it had extremely strict safeguards, legal processes, and minimally-biased enforcement rather than letting some random court make the law for me."

This is what the DSA in the EU attempts to do:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/QANDA_...

"As for the alternatives: Bitcoin, IPFS? I have very little hope."

Good riddance from my part.

As for "we can always use VPNs?"

I wouldn't trust VPNs either. Pick your poison.

EU net policies introduced by the commission for censorship attempts like chat control are extremely undemocratic and dangerous. It has an abysmal record here and it lacks democratic legitimacy in my opinion. This is plain to see if you look at the current commission president.

The same flaws are also hidden in the DSA which has no positive side, but allows for deeper surveillance and exclusions of users.

The chat control is another thing. I don't think they have censorship in mind with that thing. As for the DSA, I really see nothing in it that would entail "deeper surveillance and exclusions of users". Quite the contrary, the rights of users are extended substantially. Granted, it is not perfect and it was a really hard bargain. It is not easy to draft laws for the new digital era.
I think this would be unnecessary and false compliance. These attempts will fail like in the past because of technical difficulties. This isn't the first DNS block and there is no form of "small" censorship. It is pretty much either/or.

I believe there is a huge cost for politicians trying to introduce such policies and failing. They mostly do vanish with few exceptions. There will be new ones, but there probably still is a learning curve.

Is piracy still a thing?
It has never been more popular. Even in the heyday of Limewire and the "Golden Age," how many people had internet versus now, and how many could afford to buy CDs and discs versus now?