One of the problems with the distribution of unauthorized transmissions is that it is virtually impossible to tell the good from the bad in a packet-switched environment.  Most, if not all, filtering technologies try to look at files at either the network or client levels and try to determine what the file (or packets) is or is identifying itself to be. 

This is not a trivial undertaking due to the sheer volume of traffic.  Some would tell you that more than half of all Internet traffic is the unauthorized transmission of music or other content.  Trying to sniff all those packets is going to be very hard and will not, as they say—scale.

Less difficult is determining the IP address of the source of the transmission.  So imagine if there were a “sponsored” top level domain that would be a trusted source of licensed content for commercial purposes, such as a “.music” domain that would be owned and operated by a board of artists, musicians, songwriters and copyright owners such as MERLIN, RAC, SGA, NSAI, IFPI, NMPA, SoundExchange, PPL, AFM and AFTRA.  If a university, for example, permitted traffic originating from servers with the .music TLD, they could be assured that neither they nor their students would be sued for permitting that traffic and federal funding would flow uninterrupted.  (This could be accomplished by contract, if nothing else.)

Companies such as Akamai (that provides edge servers for the legitimate services) would be able to use the .music TLD (and might even be required to use it under license agreements with content owners).

While this wouldn’t clean up piracy overnight, it would certainly make it simpler.  So if an ISP had a user who was a heavy uploader or downloader from a DNS address that wasn’t a .music address, that ISP would know that they could rule out legitimate commercial music as a source of the transmission and act accordlinly.

That has all sorts of interesting implications.