It’s as pointless as the war on drugs. Drugs won and the draconian laws in a futile attempt to enforce prohibition just make people miserable. They poison their DNS and then what? Hop on a VPN and you can be from anywhere and use any DNS server. All the traffic from the pirate content undernet is basically between VPN providers at this point.
What made piracy come down? Plentiful availability of content at reasonable prices. What happened when the streaming market fragmented and content houses went to walled gardens? Piracy resurged.
I don’t like the decision either, but the point you make (tech-savvy people can bypass it) doesn’t acknowledge the fact that you don’t need to block 100% of users to have an effective measure. Most people don’t know how to use a vpn, or even that it exists.
Additionally, VPNs aren’t the panacea many paint them to be, and I seriously wish that stopped. There’s nothing stopping a VPN provider from sharing your data, and governments can ban VPNs. The true defence is encoding rights in laws, not circumvention.
You can even build a Great Firewall. You can ban encryption, and mandate that the house walls must be made transparent to ensure no criminal activities could hide within.
The question is whether the societal cost of that is worth the societal benefits.
I would add as an indirect reply to the poster you’re replying to, that most people know about VPNs because of exactly the point you make. Loads of VPN businesses are out there and they’re advertising in the mainstream about how they protect you from hackers, your ISP, ambiguous WiFi shenanigans, etc. Those businesses have made VPNs fairly common and point-and-click easy to use. Even where they use the same protocols (IPsec, OpenVPN, WireGuard, et al) that you’d use as a technical person, they’ve wrapped them in mom-and-pop GUIs to make them accessible to the masses.
DNS servers are anycasted. You hit the closest one routing wise. 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 most likely have poisoned records where required to. If you want to use them and not have domain poisoning you need a VPN.
There are thousands of other DNS servers out there, public and private. France (or whoever) isn't poisoning every random open DNS server in Kansas or whatever. I can even set up a new one right now on my VPS too for like 1 dollar a month.
They have learned that there is lobbying / campaign support money to be made off the industry's delusion that piracy can be "quashed". They are acting rationally, just not in your interest.
Imagine the amount of funds we would have for better support and rehabilitation of drug victims...if we just use the funds spent on the futile attempt to beat digital piracy.
Not the best argument amidst a global wave of recriminalisation. The war on drugs was a disaster. But decriminalisation didn’t work either; at the very least, the way it was done was deeply unpopular. The correct analogy might be Prohibition, not the modern war on drugs.
What made piracy come down? Plentiful availability of content at reasonable prices. What happened when the streaming market fragmented and content houses went to walled gardens? Piracy resurged.