SOPA - A rising threat

[Matt]

The Internet in America is about to change. Driving that change is the media industry, namely RIAA and the MPAA with the introduction of the SOPA bill in the House (the Senate version is PIPA). The risk is that your Internet in America will become very similar to the Internet in China, except that the music and movie industry will determine what is acceptable to access on the Internet.

Opponents to the bill (Dems, Reps, tech companies, and tech savvy consumers) seem to share an understanding of how the Internet works. Unfortunately, the bill sponsor and House Judiciary Committee Chair (Texas Congressman Lamar Smith) who is driving the bill's passage is very clearly uninformed (to put it in polite terms). Not only is the bill itself a bad one, Rep. Smith is very clearly opposed to ANY changes being made to the bill prior to a vote.

After watching the debate, it is clear that Rep. Smith has been bought. That probably isn't surprising to anyone, but what is surprising is how unconcerned many of our tech illiterate representatives seem to be about the collateral damage passage of this bill will do to the much larger tech community that is driving much of what little economic growth we're seeing in the U.S.

If you aren't already aware, ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) has been seizing domain names on the grounds of copyright infringement and/or child pornography. This is happening now, without the need for SOPA. You might not be concerned (your site isn't hosting infringing content, right?), except that a recently seized domain was FreeDNS, providing service for 84,000 websites. Clueless politicians apparently didn't understand the difference between an isolated hosting account and the DNS infrastructure. Happened to have your website DNS resolving through a company that happens to resolve DNS for an accused copyright infringing site? Whoops

Under SOPA, you can be sure that this practice is likely to become even more common. In fact under SOPA, your site might go dark if it happens to be hosted at a company with another client accused of copyright infringement. SOPA puts the burden of policing every account for infringing content on the service provider and any provider that fails in this duty is considered a co-conspirator. This will effectively shut down small hosts like FutureQuest. It will shut down many small businesses relying on the Internet as well. Your disaster plan in 2012 might need to include planning for blundering politicians carelessly pulling the trigger on fundamental Internet infrastructure like DNS or hosting, just to satisfy the demands of big media.

The Internet is a dynamic place, however. If SOPA comes to pass and is enforced, alternatives to DNS (what SOPA intends to manipulate) will become popular. Since SOPA can't reach an infringing site outside the U.S., all it can do is target DNS resolution in the US (just like the great firewall of China). So, the criminal element the bill is supposedly targeting remain operational and operational using DNS alternatives (as simple as typing in IP addresses directly). In the meantime, legitimate sites go dark, Internet businesses go bust, and ignorant big media cheers. And smart companies host outside the U.S.

U.S. movies and music certainly account for a portion of the economy that politicians rightly wish to protect. However, in their haste to protect that element, it seems that politicians are failing to see the larger picture. I have little faith that your representatives care to hear your perspective, but I thought you might want to at least be informed yourself.

-Matt