It will impact precisely 0% of the users that want to access pirated material. They will Google for solutions and they will find them.
"Oh, they'll just block those searches" you'll say, and then maybe they will, but then they'll re-phrase it. They'll ask around and, lo and behold, someone they know will know someone that can "fix" it. Maybe even for a price!
Napster tried to crack down on pirated music one time and people switched from literal spellings to Pig-Latin in a heartbeat. You wanted "Metallica" and you'd search for "Etallicamay". Word travels fast. How are you proposing to subvert that? People can adapt faster than laws.
What it will affect is site operators simply trying to make a living and having to deal with being DNS blocked all the time. Startups will fail. People will lose their digital possessions because one of the users on the site where they chose to store them was flagged for a copyright violation.
Legitimate users and businesses want a consistent, predicable identity. Shady ones could not care less how often they have to switch domains, IPs, service providers, nor how hard they are to find by the average user. They're underground. It's all word of mouth and word of mouth doesn't care about DNS filters.
It is simply not possible to block something on the internet. There is always a way around it. Look at how locked down some corporate networks are and people have found ways to bust out using HTTP or DNS tunnelling.
I'm suggesting it will impact 99% of the casual users who just want content, and will impact 0% of the dedicated users who care enough to bypass those measures.
Torrents are attractive because it's easy to download content. If you go shut down the search engines for torrents - people will move onto the next easiest option - iTunes, Amazon, etc...
"Oh, they'll just block those searches" you'll say, and then maybe they will, but then they'll re-phrase it. They'll ask around and, lo and behold, someone they know will know someone that can "fix" it. Maybe even for a price!
Napster tried to crack down on pirated music one time and people switched from literal spellings to Pig-Latin in a heartbeat. You wanted "Metallica" and you'd search for "Etallicamay". Word travels fast. How are you proposing to subvert that? People can adapt faster than laws.
What it will affect is site operators simply trying to make a living and having to deal with being DNS blocked all the time. Startups will fail. People will lose their digital possessions because one of the users on the site where they chose to store them was flagged for a copyright violation.
Legitimate users and businesses want a consistent, predicable identity. Shady ones could not care less how often they have to switch domains, IPs, service providers, nor how hard they are to find by the average user. They're underground. It's all word of mouth and word of mouth doesn't care about DNS filters.
It is simply not possible to block something on the internet. There is always a way around it. Look at how locked down some corporate networks are and people have found ways to bust out using HTTP or DNS tunnelling.