Klaus Mochalski

The Internet generates a lot of traffic. Cisco reports that this year global IP traffic on the Internet is expected to exceed 21,000 petabytes per month (a petabyte is about 1 million gigabytes) and the total volume is expected to increase by almost one-third every year. At the per-connection level, Cisco found that the average broadband connection generates almost 15 GB of Internet traffic per month. So what is all this traffic? And how much of this traffic is being used for legitimate content and how much is being used for piracy? To answer this question NBCU commissioned a new study conducted by Dr. David Price, the Head of Piracy Intelligence for Envisional (and released at an ITIF event today) that paints a vivid picture of the current size and state of online piracy. The top line finding is striking: an estimated 23.8 percent of global Internet traffic is attributable to copyright-infringing content. The number is staggering. In the offline world, this would be as if almost a quarter of the traffic on our highways was made up of criminals shipping counterfeit or illegal products. For policymakers this report should serve as a much needed wakeup call that the problem of digital piracy has not abated and demands a response on par with the magnitude of the situation.