.
Anyway, how would using a VPN help? You still have to send packets to that, which first go through the ISP, and then packets come back through the ISP.
Those packets are encrypted, and going to I.P addresses that are not suspect. To shut down anything (including & especially large transfers) traveling over a VPN will piss off several tens of thousands of businesses that provide billions upon billions of $$$s in income for ISPs.
Just because packets are encrypted is not reasonable cause to suspect, and suspecting something is not grounds to take action. There has to be some sort of evidence to found an investigation, conclusion and then actions upon.
I've never looked into it, so I don't actually know anything about it
Not to put too fine a point on it ... but *
ahem* take an hour to search teh webz about VPNs and get a basic education. You'll understand why VPN is one good, basic solution that can be adopted immediately. Certainly it is not a forever solution, and there are other things that can be done in addition to a VPN.
It'd be like having a bus driver go to a place they know they shouldn't and expecting them to not notice?
Hmm. Let's try a similar analogy.
Suppose it's a network of commuter trains in a large city, like New York. A lot of stops have very heavy traffic. Some stops are in districts known to be high "crime" areas, others are in business & trade districts. And, some trains are made of glass while others are lead-shielded steel.
Open torrenting is like using a glass train to visit a known high "crime" district, and then using certain stops to offload & load huge amounts of goods in glass boxes that the "authorities" can video tape at will and examine at their leisure.
A VPN is like visiting a legitimate trade district and using well-known loading docks to pick up your goods, which are in steel shipping containers, which you place on steel, lead-lined trains with all the other legal shipping traffic for delivery to your computer. Nobody knows what you've picked up or has any opportunity to see the contents of the packets in transit. All the torrenting activity takes place at the loading dock with the rest of the world, not between the loading dock and your house.
To stretch it a little further, imagine that the "trade district" is outside of the jurisdiction of New York ... perhaps located in the Netherlands or Russia. The "authorities" in those jurisdictions couldn't care less about and make no attempt to observe the packets at those loading docks ... so there is no actionable evidence by the ISP to attempt to pry into those packets. And they lack the authority to try.
Additionally, if the ISP decides to penalize everyone using the foreign trade districts, they will piss off a huge number more paying customers ... big business customers with gigantic, billable service contracts that keep stock holders in the ISPs
very happy ... than the few people attempting to "smuggle" a few DVDs home for personal use.
All the uploading is taking place on another ISPs bandwidth in a foreign jurisdiction, so the U.S. ISPs have less than zero interest in knowing anything about it. In fact, they would have to breech numerous international laws to try & do so.
