The ban on access to The Pirate Bay has no effect on bit torrent traffic in The Netherlands, according to a blog by Dutch ISP XS4All.
Through a court order Dutch anti-piracy organisation Brein has taken care that the country’s main ISPs Ziggo, XS4All, KPN, T-Mobile, UPC and Tele2 have to block TPB, but users seem to avoid the ban by accessing proxy servers instead.
According to XS4All, there is no sign that their subscribers are changing their downloading habits, on the contrary. “Since the Pirate Back blocking lawsuit began, BitTorrent traffic has not been reduced, it increased instead,” wrote XS4All’s Niels Huijbregts on the company blog.
The ISP looked at the traffic on its network and found that over the past year traffic increased on ports that are commonly used for BitTorrent. The ISP claimed that all the news about the blockade may be one of the reasons for this increase.
“I think that the increase is a result of all the media attention for the lawsuit and the blockade. Perhaps people who until then had never downloaded thought ‘I hear so much about downloading music and movies, let me try it!’,” wrote Huijbregts.
In a chart, XS4All demonstrates that torrent traffic remained stable after the February 1 ban on the country’s main ISPs, who breach around 90% of all Dutch internet users (see chart here; the red line denotes the date when the blockade came into force)
