I generally hesitate to post a political comment, but this is one that I feel is very important.
SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act. It’s a bill coming up for a vote on Wednesday (tomorrow, as I write this). It’s one of those last-minute, let’s-rush-this-through-while-folks-are-busy-Christmas-shopping pieces of legislation that the entertainment-industry sponsors of this bill hope you won’t notice until it’s too late. By the way, this would not be the first time a bill has been rushed through Congress just before Christmas.
Innocent-sounding title, no? Pardon my cynicism, but congressional bills always have titles that obscure their real purpose. This one is no different. It’s an internet censorship bill, with a new twist: It will allow for-profit corporations to interpret and enforce it, in addition to the government. It’s bad enough that the government has this sort of power.
The question is not whether a for-profit corporation will abuse this sort of enforcement power, but how long it will take for them to get started.
If this bill passes, it will be only a matter of days (if that long) before you start seeing corporations taking down any website with a negative review. And, only a matter of time before any politically-incorrect website, like this one, gets taken down, without recourse. If you think that is something that only happens in places like China or Thailand, think again.
This is not the first time this sort of thing has been tried, nor will it be the last.
For more information on the implications of this, see this TechDirt Article on SOPA.
Update: It appears that Congress has caught enough flak over this to postpone the discussion of the bill until sometime next year, although I have not seen a confirmation of that.
