If they really wanted to slow down piracy online, they could scare ISPs into firewalling everyone. Un-firewalled Internet accounts would come at a higher business level service cost. Only centralized internet servers would work.

That would kill gaming & some forms of online chat (including video conferencing & possibly online phone) services also however.
There are some ISP's (like mine) that are highly reluctant to such pressures & are willing to take such issues to court. Not only ISPs would be willing to take the issue to court as it could affect their revenue or participation level of clients.

The copyright/piracy trolls will always be there stomping their feet and screaming like little spoilt children not getting their way. They will continually point to scapegoats.

Almost ever since audio recording contraptions existed there has been unofficial copies made. This period of time is probably somewhere near the 100 year mark. Did that ever have a major effect on the music industry's vital income? No

Even the past 50 years there were cassette-tape duplicates made and shared around (be it from vinyl or radio.) Did that ever have a major effect on the music industry's vital income? No

Strangely, over the past 15 years since file-sharing was possible on the internet, the music industry (and others) have been kicking up the hugest fuss ever seen in the world in regards to copyright. They pressure the government (yes with lots of financial donations) who then pressure other governments with trade at risk to change their laws and approach to copyright handling.

As some of us know, the music and video industries were incredibly slow to adapt their business model approach with the changing times. So who is to blame?
Of course scapegoats include p2p file-sharing because it's a good excuse to appease investors. Whereas obviously a clean-out of the management cronies of these industries was/is in need and probably long overdue. (Replacing management with individuals who possess an education might be beneficial. - p)

That very last sentence in very light grey ; can that only be seen by members or is it an edit ; ??

Is that better? It's still a light grey but slightly darker.

I always forget about gaming. You have a pretty good point there. I still wonder if that couldn't be worked out so long as the corprate server isn't walled. Would kill games that allow serving from within the game without steam or anything. Seems like those kinda games are for from the mainstream these days.

I've been thinking about this more. If all non-commercial IPs were firewalled, many services like Skype, Game Servers, Messengers, or IRC services hosted on a commercial level service could still remain quite usable with little or no adaptation.

From an anti-p2p point of view, internet connectivity would have to have a large enough price gap between commercial and non-commercial accounts for this to work. Otherwise most people would just cough up a little more money for control over their firewall.

Regardless of pricing difference, it would still be easier for ISPs to recognize those participating in PC to PC communications involved in networks known for piracy. In the past this was not a big deal. But with more court cases against ISPs resulting in client piracy also being the responsibility of the Internet Provider, this will likely become more of an issue to some degree.

Even though it is highly unlikely that non-commercial forced firewalling would become common policy, even with such a state P2P networks could still be maintained with a high rate of success. I don't want to make it seem like a cakewalk, but it would be possible with higher network maintenance. Even if none of the participants had a commercial (non-firewalled) service.

I then thought of another kill switch. Again all commercial services could easily adapt with little effort. But even a network that managed to circumvent forced firewalling would have a very hard time circumventing this in addition to firewalling. Dynamic IPs with an hourly refresh.

Any network surviving this would have to in someway or another rely on a commercial service. Like chatroom or email. But it could still work. The problem then seems to be hinged on how the governments of the world look at encryption in light of recent political controversies. If email was relied on for connectivity (in this imagined world of forced firewalls and dynamic IPs) the data for connectivity would need to be encrypted to remain somewhat reliable. The reason being that email providers (and any commercial service in general) would be held responsible for contributing to P2P networking. The only way to protect services like that would be to prevent them from knowing their service was contributing as much as possible.

With this whole imagined scenario all hinging on encryption this brings us to the possible future legality of encryption. One political position on the plate is that encryption would be legal, so long as the government(s) (including "Law Enforcement") have exclusive access via back doors. With law enforcement having access to the networks connectivity (tunneled over a service like email) all that would need to be established it that the network is used to pirate data. In such a world it might even be enough that the network could be used to do so.

If you have made it this far, please keep in mind that I intend this as a thought experiment.

I guess steganography and facebook accounts could be used, hiding connectivity data behind meme posts....

How do you define "Firewalled"?
Do you mean simply UDP firewalled, or TCP firewalled, or other protocol? Or do you mean blocking via other means?

I suspect UDP or TCP firewalling would be a legal breach of services offered, potentially making an entity at risk of being sued be it the ISP or government being the target of such action.

You also need to consider proxy use and VPN's (although probably not so many people want to invest in VPN use, which costs, but can be very good.)

One that know simply change ISP, I have never switched to cable here in my country because it is in a permanent "firewalled state" (without pubblic IP, if you don't pay an additional fee; it is like a private LAN of cable users when you see it from external internet).
Cable to cable is unfirewalled, cable to normal internet is firewalled; there is also a custom version of eMule for this cable provider.

__________________
Skulls! Multi-Network WebCache