For one-and-a-half years now, we’ve been following the play-by-play of the "six strikes" plan set to hit the majority of American Internet users sometime this year.

The Copyright Alert System (CAS), as it's formally known, is now set to come online this year. It's been orchestrated by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and major American ISPs, which are collected under an umbrella organization called the Center for Copyright Information (CCI).

Once in place, the CAS monitors Internet usage looking for traffic of unauthorized downloads. Then, users will be "educated" about legal alternatives. These individuals will have to acknowledge those warnings, and over time, they may have their Internet access throttled or may have legal charges brought.

But a new report and leaked document published last week by TorrentFreak suggests Verizon’s six strikes plan will also affect its business customers, beyond its regular residential customers. According to the Verizon document, once an accused infringer reaches the fifth and sixth warning stage, the Internet connection would be reduced to 256kbps for two to three days.

If true, that could potentially put a huge burden on small businesses—particularly cafés with open Wi-Fi hotspots. Any business with more than a few employees, therefore, could be unduly, collectively punished via their ISP simply because of the accused actions of one person. That’s far different from a small, contained home network, where there is only a small number of users at any given time—and likely, the one paying the bill knows all of them.

Ed McFadden, a Verizon spokesperson, said the document was authentic, but he cautioned it was a "working draft document" that was subject to change.

"Things are still being discussed and worked out," he told Ars. "Beyond that we're going to be informing our customers about the program within the next month."

The CCI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Notification and acknowledgement

Based on Verizon’s document, customers would receive first and second notification warnings "delivered by e-mail and automatic voicemail." These would inform the customer "how to check to see if file sharing software is operating on your computer (and how to remove it) and tell you where to find information on obtaining content legally."

The third and fourth warnings would "redirect your browser to a special webpage where you can review and acknowledge receiving the alerts," then "provide a short video about copyright law and the consequences of copyright infringement." Furthermore, the user would be required to click an "acknowledgement" button. But the fifth and sixth warnings would lead to a speed slowdown.

However, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario—a Wi-Fi café, for instance—where someone using an open network has been downloading unauthorized copies of Game of Thrones, and the café owner (or another customer, for that matter) is faced with these warnings and the acknowledgement splash page. Why should the café (and its customers) be penalized with a bandwidth slowdown, rather than the alleged infringer herself?

When this scenario was outlined to Verizon’s spokesperson, Ed McFadden, he said he wasn’t sure how the company would respond.

(Update January 15, 4:00pm CT: McFadden re-iterated to Ars by e-mail that running a Wi-Fi hotspot on its own was a violation of Verizon's terms of service to begin with. "Thus your discussion about Internet cafes and open hot spots is misleading and inaccurate to the reader on a factual basis," he wrote. "We request that you correct the record.")

Ars has also asked for clarification from Verizon, outlining a similar scenario as described above, as it would pertain to a closed, small business network (rather than an open, public Wi-Fi café), and is waiting to hear back.

"Who would get that captive portal?"

Internet advocates said such a plan to enforce this against businesses seemed unreasonable, particularly given that under current American law, network owners and operators are not liable for infringing material that passes through their pipes.

"If it applies to something like a café with Wi-Fi, there's really no way for the café to monitor and police what the users are doing," Mitch Stoltz, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars. "It strikes me as not that credible."

Beyond that, he said, the practicalities of acknowledging a warning seem difficult to understand when applied to a business that may have a constantly rotating group of users.

"Who would get that captive portal?" he asked. "Would it be fulfilled once one person acknowledged it?"

Worse still, other activists pointed out this entire scheme seems to be really about expanding income for ISPs.

"This does create a scenario that discourages open Wi-Fi, which I think is a problem—I'm sure everyone has a story about how they had their day saved by some stranger being neighborly enough to allow public access to their wireless signal," Sherwin Siy, the vice president of legal affairs at Public Knowledge, told Ars.

"Of course, this is one area where the rightsholders and the ISPs' interests intersect very nicely. Verizon and its competitors want to encourage the number of paid subscribers, and the RIAA and MPAA want to have Internet connections be as identifiable as possible."

Given CAS’ constant delays, we’re still waiting to see how this plays out once it finally hits the public Internet—theoretically sometime soon.