As noted on Plala’s page, the view has emerged that complete P2P traffic blocking likely violates “the secrecy of communications” provisions.
In practical terms, this means that under current law, ISPs cannot fully block Winny at the network level.
As I’ve written before, completely controlling only P2P traffic is also technically very difficult. As seen in Plala’s user forum, some online games are already experiencing communication delays and disruptions. And the forum itself has become overwhelmed with user complaints on this topic.
These two dimensions — legal problems and technical problems — suggest that regulating Winny faces significant obstacles.
At its core, P2P technology — with Winny as a leading example — is a remarkable development that simply wasn’t possible in the narrowband era. The scale of the Winny problem comes down to how people use it. The software itself is not inherently illegal.
The problem is how certain users are using Winny.
Trying to solve a people problem with a mechanical block is why things have gotten messy.
If internet anonymity could be reduced, this kind of problem might not occur in the first place. Anonymity makes it easy for people to slip into thinking “even if it’s illegal, no one will know.” If there were no anonymity online, things would have been different.