Blocking pirate sites reduces internet traffic, study finds

New research from the Catolica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics in Portugal, in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University, suggests that blocking domain names from pirate sites can reduce internet traffic and, presumably, piracy.

Researchers wanted to know what would be the consequences of blocking pirate sites such as BitTorrent. Ideally, blocking pirate sites should have a positive impact on legal consumption. For example, people might use video-on-demand services more, become interested in pay TV channels and watch TV more regularly, but in practice, that’s not really the case, according to a new study.

The study was conducted in a country that has a voluntary blocking system for pirate sites, but the name of the country was not disclosed. The study has analyzed data from a random sample of 100,000 subscribersincluding metrics such as upload and download traffic, paid VoD spend, overall TV viewing time, and daily BitTorrent usage.

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Legal solutions have not been the alternative of choice for Internet users

The results showed a clear effect on internet traffic generated by BitTorrent users, with a significant decrease in the use of downloads, whether upload or download. Additionally, the percentage of households using BitTorrent also declined and continued to do so in the months after the lockdowns were put in place.

However, the study also shows that widespread blocking by ISPs does not necessarily favor the use of pay VoD or television services. The researchers found only a marginal increase in viewership on these services.

So, blocking pirate sites does not really seem to encourage Internet users to turn to legal alternatives. The researchers suggest this could be due to the limited availability and use of legal movie and TV streaming alternatives in the country studied at the time.