Telstra’s Anti-Piracy Throttling Trial Raises ACCC Eyebrows


Telstra, like any internet service provider, would love to stop piracy. That’s why it’s trialling technologies like packet inspection and throttling of peer-to-peer content sent over its network. But not so fast, Telstra. The ACCC wants a word before you do anything to damage good, old net neutrality.

In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, chairman of the ACCC, Rod Sims, said that Telstra’s trial of its packet inspection and especially fiddling about with speed limiting of different traffic might mess with net neutrality, especially if Telstra demotes some network traffic in favour of its own:

Clearly there is a vertical integration issue where internet service providers can control what comes down their pipe and obviously if, unrelated to the reports about Telstra, we see that ISPs were using that technology to influence their own content over other content then that would be of concern to us.

Telstra continues to assure customers that it’s only testing the new anti-piracy measures right now to see what’s best for its network.

Read the full interview on the AFR for more.

Would this make you leave your ISP if it were rolled out for everyone? [AFR]


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