First-order effects

• Chinese users lose direct access to three of the most popular torrent indexes overnight — not via DNS blocking but via hijacking, meaning lookups for these domains return wrong results rather than an error page.
• The sites themselves face a sudden loss of Chinese traffic and must decide whether to respond (mirrors, alternate domains) or write off the market.

Second-order effects

• Hijacking rather than blocking pushes users toward workarounds — proxies and VPNs — which in turn gives the state a new target; years later China would block VPN services that skirt online censorship, closing that escape hatch.
• Sites like The Pirate Bay begin treating censorship as a product problem, eventually shipping their own anti-censorship tooling such as the Pirate Browser built to evade exactly this kind of interference.

Third-order effects

• If infrastructure-level manipulation becomes standard practice, the fight shifts from individual site takedowns to a cat-and-mouse over routing and DNS trust — and Western platforms aren't exempt: Google later began delisting BitTorrent and RapidShare terms under its own policy pressure, showing censorship converging on piracy sites from both state and corporate directions.
• The pattern points toward a bifurcated internet where access to major content platforms depends on jurisdiction, normalizing network-level intervention as a governance tool worldwide.