No one wins

Second, the consumption of this content has gone off the web and onto Virtual Private Networks and Peer-to-Peer providers. Many people confuse the web with the internet. Think of the internet as a set of train tracks, and a webpage as one kind of carriage that can travel down it. The nature of the webpages is that the carriage has huge windows and everyone can see inside.

VPN and P2P are effectively sealed carriages with virtually no way of seeing inside. I'd bet a cold beer on a hot day that when the big internet service providers then and there do some content analysis of the packets of data they are moving around, they will find the volume of VPN and P2P data has gone way north.

The impact is a little different

Overseas the impact is a little different. Cloud-computing content specialists Deepfield Networks just released a study that shows that or rather than constraining American downloading of content, the closure of MegaUpload has just pushed it offshore. So to put it more exactly than the traffic going to US servers, it is crossing expensive transatlantic links to servers based in the Netherlands and Russia.