Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Blog

SOPA would censor us, not websites

By Rodney H. Brown

Today is the SOPA Blackout protest day on the web — when giant, high-traffic sites like Google, Reddit and Wikipedia have done a little or a lot to show how overreaching the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) are by censoring themselves for a day. The problem is, most of them don’t show what the real danger of these Acts, as currently written, are.

One of the most Gestapo-esque aspects of both Acts is the provision that would allow any company complaining of a website using its intellectual property without permission to get an order from a judge that pulls that website’s ability to be seen by anyone on the Web. Without a trial.

Essentially the Acts let those allegedly offended companies to get this court order to block the Domain Name Server records that tell any browser where it can find the allegedly offending website. No DNS record, no way for any browser, anywhere in the world, to find the site. That isn’t just censoring the site, that is censoring you and me.

Think about it. That kind of an action doesn’t force the site to change anything. What it does is force the keepers of DNS records to censor you and me from ever finding it. In that scenario, you and I would have done absolutely nothing to infringe on anyone’s intellectual property, yet we would be the one’s being censored from accessing a part of the Internet.

Sure, the primary business effect of blocking a site’s DNS record would be to cause its traffic to disappear, killing its value as an advertising platform, which is how most sites make their money. So it would be very effective against the allegedly offending sites as well. But the direct action is against you and me — we are the ones being censored.

A more accurate protest of SOPA and PIPA would be for sites like Google and Wired to voluntarily suspend their DNS records for a day, so that anyone trying to get there would get the gut-wrenching “website not found” message in their browser. Boing-boing actually replicates this with its blacked out landing page. But most sites do need to keep traffic coming in somehow during this protest, and they all link to ways we can all contact our Representatives and Senators to express our dissatisfaction with being censored. One of those sites, from Google, is here.

Remember, the targets are the allegedly offending IP-violating websites, but we are the victims of the censorship.