That phenomenon is even more obvious with Usenet - the providers are literally hosting the pirated content on their own servers, and approximately nobody is using them for anything but piracy, and it's extremely obvious they intend to enable piracy when they offer bandwidth quotas in the terabytes, but the process of using it is just arcane enough to stay out of the mainstream and fly under the radar to this day.

That's not a great metaphor since they become technically more effective since p2p performance improves as the network grows assuming a minimum seed/leech ratio