You can take down Pirate Bay, but you can’t kill the Internet it created
I see a lot of the antipiracy efforts now being directed towards end-user devices; in particular, mobile. I think the trend of walled-garden environments with app stores, the app-centric model of interaction, and all the increasingly locked-down (always in the name of security) features of modern OSs are where the real battle is being fought, and it's one that they seem to be winning: with data being managed by and hidden behind apps, touted as a feature of convenience, the users of these new consumption-oriented devices are being distanced from direct control of their data, and this greatly increases the effort required for them to pirate. If the majority of the population eventually only has access to one of these heavily locked-down devices (and traditional desktops/laptops become a niche product), then it's easy to see how file sharing could become virtually nonexistent - almost everyone will not even know what a file is, much less see any ways to copy and share the contents of one. The only sharing they would know of is that explicitly featured in the apps they use. It wouldn't be too dissimilar to the world of Stallman's Right To Read ( <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html</a> ).<p>Fortunately most computer users today still know about files and torrents, and hopefully that knowledge continues to thrive, but I do see large-scale attempts at fundamentally changing how we interact with computing devices that could eliminate that knowledge and those freedoms associated with it in the future. Taking down TPB and chasing the other torrent sites isn't quite as effective as systematically eliminating the knowledge that makes those sites possible; in other words, remove the concept of filesharing and "the Internet it created" will essentially kill itself.