April 02, 2009

By By Glenn Peoples

Internet traffic in Sweden has fallen 30% on the first day a new anti-piracy law took effect in the country, reports BBC News and The Local, an English-language news site in Sweden. From the BBC News article:

"By 2pm on Wednesday, internet traffic in Sweden had fallen by about 30% compared with the previous day. Statistics collected by Netnod, the Swedish clearing house for internet traffic, showed a dramatic drop in traffic. Compared with the previous level on Tuesday of about 120 gigabits of data passing over the network every second, on Wednesday it was down to 80Gbps."

Similarly, The Local report claims traffic had dropped by 30% by 4pm on Wednesday.

The new Swedish law, based on the European Union's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, allows courts to order ISPs to reveal the identities of suspected illegal file shares.

A post at TorrentFreak has a graph of aggregate traffic for Stockholm, Sweden for the last week. The trend line shows a clear decrease in traffic. The Swedish Pirate Bay party chairman predicted to TorrentFreak that the drop would be temporary and would "wear off after a week or two."

Regardless of the duration of the drop in traffic, it appears the law's goal of reducing illegal downloading may be working. Based on data available from Europa Technologies, the number of Swedes who logged into the Pirate Bay track over the last 24 hours was 385,000. That number, roughly 5% of the country's population, is unchanged since the new law took effect. Since the same number of people are logging into Pirate Bay, and since Swedish Internet traffic has dropped sharply, one can reasonably deduce that people have been downloading less illegal content.

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