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If Sweden’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive was crafted to scare the hell out of the country’s Internet population, it seems to have had the desired affect. Swedish Internet traffic dropped by a third on Wednesday after the law, which allows copyright holders to force ISPs to divulge the IP addresses of computers sharing copyrighted material, was implemented.

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U2 manager Paul McGuinness must be beside himself. Despite the band’s best efforts to prevent its new album, “No Line on the Horizon,” from appearing prematurely on the Internet, copies are being distributed there a week prior to its scheduled release. It’s not the fault of the ISPs, never mind that they are, according to McGuinness, “destroying the recorded music industry” by failing to tackle piracy.

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Ironic, isn’t it, that Google, one of Net neutrality’s staunchest advocates, has been approaching major cable and phone companies with a proposal that appears to violate the very tenets of that principle? How could a company that has argued tirelessly that all Internet traffic should be treated equally, suddenly reverse course and seek preferential treatment for its own traffic?
Short answer: it didn’t.

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Wow. Global spam volumes plummeted today after two ISPs disconnected a Web hosting firm outed by the Washington Post as harboring some truly unsavory clients. Denied Internet access by Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric, bot hosting network McColo is clearly having trouble spewing out spam and malware. There has been a 41 percent drop in spam volume since the Washington Post story broke.

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According to security experts, Web-hosting outfit McColo is responsible for enabling the broadcast of more than 75 percent of all spam globally. Its client list is a rogues gallery of bad-guy syndicates involved in everything from botnets to counterfeit pharmaceuticals and kiddie porn. So how is it that MoColo’s ISPs, Hurricane Electric and Global Crossing, were unaware of that until notified by a Washington Post reporter?

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In the future, “heavy users” of Comcast’s broadband service speeds may face not just a periodic slowing–sorry, deprioritizing–of their service, but a capping of that service as well. Broadband Reports brings word today that Comcast plans to implement a 250GB broadband cap come October.

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To Comcast, throttling or degrading the performance of file-sharing services is a necessary traffic-management technique. To the Federal Communications Commission it’s a violation of the agency’s network-neutrality principles.

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The Internet-filtering agreements New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo inked with Verizon (VZ), Sprint (S) and Time Warner Cable (TWX) today, while certainly groundbreaking, pale a bit in comparison to the ones announced in France.

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John Gilmore once famously claimed that “the Internet interprets censorship as failure and routes around it.” If he’s right, there’s no reason to worry that an agreement by three of the nation’s largest Internet-service providers to block access to newsgroups and Web sites that traffic in child pornography might have other frightening consequences. If not, well …

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If Bono is U2’s geopolitical pragmatist, the band’s manager, Paul McGuinness, is its neo-Luddite. At the Music Matters confab in Hong Kong, McGuinness slagged broadband Internet service providers, accusing them of aiding and abetting music piracy while CD sales and royalty payments to musicians plunge.

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