From London: as Australians woke this morning, a detailed account of digital piracy across the Middle East and North Africa was circulating through tech and media circles, reported by Wired. The story it tells is less a tale of lawbreaking and more a portrait of systemic failure — one that matters well beyond the region, and one that streaming companies have so far been unable to resolve by legal pressure alone.
The conventional wisdom inside the content industry holds that piracy is primarily a moral and enforcement problem: people want something for nothing, and the answer is better laws and tougher crackdowns. That framing is not entirely wrong, but in the Middle East and North Africa it is badly incomplete. In countries such as Syria and Lebanon, sanctions, financial crises, and fragile banking systems make even basic digital payments difficult. For millions of people in those markets, the problem is not a reluctance to pay. It is a structural inability to do so.
Many international platforms do not operate in Syria at all because of US sanctions imposed on the Assad regime during the country's civil war, restricting financial transactions and preventing many global companies from offering services there. The result is a kind of digital exile: residents of Damascus are locked out of the same cultural content freely accessible in Beirut, Cairo, or London, not because of their own choices but because of geopolitical decisions made in Washington. For many young people in these regions, piracy, VPNs, Telegram channels, and shared drives are not seen as fringe systems operating outside the law, but as the default way of accessing culture.
The economics compound the problem. Currency devaluations in countries such as Egypt and Lebanon have made foreign streaming subscriptions, typically priced in dollars, far less affordable for local audiences. A Netflix subscription that costs a few dollars in purchasing-power terms for an American consumer can represent a significant share of a monthly wage in Cairo or Beirut. Enforcement, in that context, is beside the point.
Jean-Pierre Andreaux, head of content protection at StarzPlay, a Dubai-based streaming platform operating across the region, told Wired that user experience drives platform choice as much as price. He says organised IPTV piracy operations have become increasingly sophisticated, designing services that closely mimic legitimate streaming platforms, and referred to market analysis suggesting that roughly "23 percent of users in the region still access pirate IPTV services." The sophistication of these services is not incidental. To an average viewer, the difference is nearly invisible, and sometimes illegal services even offer faster performance and better user experience than smaller legal platforms.
In Egypt, the channels of distribution have also adapted to messaging culture. Pirated content circulates quickly through messaging platforms, with Telegram groups uploading new episodes within hours. If content is not licensed in Egypt, as one user told Wired, someone will eventually share it. Telegram says it removes copyrighted material when rights holders submit formal complaints, but the platform's vast network of channels can make consistent enforcement very difficult.
The rights industry has not been passive. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, a global anti-piracy coalition that includes major studios and streaming services, has worked with Egyptian authorities to shut down several of the region's largest piracy operations in recent years, including the CimaClub and Cima4U networks. Cima4U alone operated 498 domains that enabled users to stream content illegally, attracting over 30 million combined monthly visits from 11.6 million unique visitors, with a library of more than 165,000 titles. Those are not small operations. Shutting them down is a genuine achievement. But new services emerge, and the underlying demand does not disappear.
The strongest counterargument to a purely enforcement-driven approach comes not from piracy apologists but from digital rights researchers embedded in the region itself. Abed Kataya, digital content manager at SMEX, a Beirut-based organisation focused on internet policy in the Middle East and North Africa, told Wired that the framing matters. He argues that piracy in the region is shaped less by culture than by structural barriers, and that it is "not a cultural choice; rather, it has multiple layers." Those layers include the absence of local platforms, payment failures, censorship circumvention, and pricing that does not reflect local economic conditions.
A decade ago, there were only seven streaming services operating in the Middle East and North Africa; there are now more than 50, with the majority being regional platforms focused on local markets. That growth is genuine progress, but it has not been evenly distributed across the region, and it has not reached the countries most constrained by sanctions and financial instability. The streaming market is projected to be worth close to US$5.7 billion by 2028, according to Digital TV Research estimates cited by industry analysts. The piracy problem is, among other things, a drag on that potential.
For Canberra, the broader lesson here is relevant to how Australia thinks about digital trade and intellectual property in its own region. Australian content creators and studios have a direct stake in global IP enforcement regimes, and Australia's trade agreements, including those negotiated through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, increasingly touch on digital services and copyright standards. A world where geopolitical sanctions routinely create entire populations of involuntary pirates is also a world where IP enforcement frameworks become harder to sustain politically.
The honest conclusion is that neither the content industry nor its critics have a complete answer here. Enforcement matters, and large-scale organised piracy operations cause genuine harm to creators and rights holders across the supply chain. At the same time, a licensing and payment system that structurally excludes entire countries is not one that can be defended purely on ethical grounds. The tension between protecting intellectual property and ensuring broad cultural access is real, and reasonable people disagree about where the balance should lie. What the MENA situation makes clear is that enforcement alone, without addressing the structural access failures that drive demand, is unlikely to change the numbers in any lasting way.