Congress should ignore “Internet exceptionalists” who oppose the House’s Stop Online...
Congress should ignore “Internet exceptionalists” who oppose the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Senate’s PROTECT IP Act out of hostility to the U.S. intellectual property regime, and with false claims that the bills will “break the Internet,” said…
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a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. For some opponents of the bills, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “the Internet is inherently different from the offline world and should be off-limits to the societal rules that a democratically-elected government wants to impose on it,” said the report (http://xrl.us/bmkb7y), written by ITIF analyst Daniel Castro: “Any attempt to impose limitations on illegal activities is decried as the first step to totalitarian repression.” Though EFF and others are simply interested in “blunting the effects of policies they do not like” by protesting copyright enforcement measures, others, like Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, are “willfully blind” to the severity of online piracy, claiming the DMCA takedown process works fine, Castro said: Such people “refuse to recognize even basic facts.” Castro told Congress to be wary of Internet engineers who claim the bills would break the Internet or the DNS, because “network engineers frequently claim that certain technologies ‘break’ the Internet” to some extent -- including network address translation, which enables routers to split Internet connections to multiple users but also violates the “end-to-end principle” and “breaks” the session initiation protocol used in VoIP calls. “Yet the Internet continues to thrive and users still make VoIP calls,” he said. But Castro pointed to critics who have raised “reasonable questions” about enforcement mechanisms, especially in SOPA, and want to improve the bills. The Business Software Alliance notably backpedaled on its support for SOPA’s existing language after a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the bill (WID Nov 17 p1), saying as written it “could sweep in more than just truly egregious actors” (http://xrl.us/bmkb89). Bill language should ensure that enforcement mechanisms are “targeted, fair and effective,” without succumbing to “hysterical, ideological posturing and threats,” Castro said.