“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.” – Albus Dumbledore, Harry potter and the Deathly Hallows, part 2
I love the way many politicians can spin things. How they can say the worst possible things and still make you feel good about it… One understands why thousands of Germans were spell bound by Hitler’s hate propoganda because it is not what is said, but how it is said, and the emotional chord that is targeted that influences the audience. So what’s the point, you may ask? Why am I so amused by the art of speech and the written word? Well, it so happens that after having read several articles on the now infamous proposed bill “Stop Online Piracy Act” in the US, I happened to take notice and read the text of the bill myself. I was immediately amused by the title of the Bill, which is,
To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. Property and for other purposes – Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
A naive reading of the title may suggest noble and even altruistic intentions, but the devil lies in the details.
Let me summarize the bill as per my understanding from a cursory reading. The Bill recognizes that there are two kinds of sites – Domestic and Foreign. A domestic site is registered and run by a someone within U.S. whereas a Foreign site is one which is owned and operated from outside U.S borders. The bill also identifies all the supporting online organizations for a website, which are:
- Domain Name Registrar
- DNS Servers
- Search Engines
- Payment Networks
- Advertising Providers
Now in summary, what the bill is proposing is that any U.S. Domestic site which engages in piracy or otherwise illegal activities should be seized and the supporting organizations remove the site from their services, and for a foreign site for which they may not be able to seize the site, all U.S. domestic service providers of the above mentioned categories, remove the site. This would effectively ensure that the offending foreign site(s) cannot be accessed from within U.S. This is what the bill is proposing in a nut shell.
On the face of it and from a third person point of view, I do not find any objection to the bill. Fine, if someone is engaging in illegal piracy etc. they deserve that their site be take down. However the problem does not lie in what the bill “seems” to say but what the Bill actually “intends” to do. Therein lies the great magic of words… You can say one thing but use it as a front for something entirely different. What this Bill essentially is aiming at, is a blanket U.S. federal control over the internet. We all realize to a certain degree that media houses in all developed and developing nations have various degrees of partnerships with U.S. media agencies. Most journalists and news agencies somewhat rely for their foreign stories on their American counterparts. In short, for all traditional media sources, there is a degree of U.S. media influence on most of the developed and developing world where there are worthwhile economies. However, the Internet is an entirely different ball game altogether. Just like this blog, there are millions of others. For every established media name, there are hundreds, if not thousands of John Does (Anonymous authors), hence opinion online can not be significantly controlled or largely influenced. China realized this from very early on, and hence you have the Great Firewall of China.
The U.S policy makers are sadly going down the same route.
Let us, for the time being ignore the question of online freedom and ask ourselves, why would it matter so much if U.S had this law. We are not in the U.S and what difference does it make to us?
The answer is simple for anyone who knows how the net works. I am unsure of the exact number but I would venture a guess that more than 90% of domains are registered with American Registrars. Paypal and similar payment processing networks operate most monetary transactions for smaller and medium websites and almost all Advertising agencies which provide decent AD inventories are American. Now, the reason the internet has had the phenomenal growth as it has is because of one most important factor: User Generated Content. No matter how big or small a site you are, User Generated Content are the biggest draws of traffic and subsequently revenue. Google, Youtube, Facebook etc all have their content contributed by their users. In spite of the best filters you place, there will always be something that will slip through and your site may be hosting illegal content for at least some time. Now SOPA mentions that the owner of the site will be contacted for the offending content, however the implementation of this “contact” can be a very very gray area. Domain Registrars and DNS operators will indeed fear their business being impacted and would want to remain in the good books of the U.S. govt and you may suddenly find that your site is no longer accessible because some multinational music company or movie production house or software giant does not like what is available “through” your site. I say “through”, because unlike previous laws where users linking to other illegal / copyrighted content from your site was not a felony on your part, SOPA now brings in even linking to content under it’s ambit.
So in essence, this bill will do the exact opposite of what it claims, kill prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship and Innovation online.
Also is interesting to find Congressional staffers behind SOPA get shiny new jobs as entertainment industry lobbyists, which further demonstrates everything which is wrong with this Bill. Additionally, while this Bill may kill off small online entrepreneurs and stifle creativity from small time artists, it will however not be able to enforce protection of intellectual property as explained in this technical paper by Steve Crocker (Shinkuro, Inc.), David Dagon (Georgia Tech), Dan Kaminsky (DKH), Danny McPherson (Verisign, Inc.) and Paul Vixie (Internet Systems Consortium): Security and Other Technical Concerns Raised by the DNS Filtering Requirements in the PROTECT IP Bill. Amongst many other concerns, they write:
- DNS filters would be evaded easily, and would likely prove ineffective at reducing online
infringement. Further, widespread circumvention would threaten the security and stability of
the global DNS.- The DNS provisions would undermine the universality of domain names, which has been one
of the key enablers of the innovation, economic growth, and improvements in
communications and information access unleashed by the global Internet.
I will leave the readers with this somewhat humorous and satirical song by Dan Bull,
And if you want to read the entire Stop Online Piracy Act Bill yourself, you can download the PDF from here.
