Stop Online Prosperity Act

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a bill up for debate in the United States House of Representatives, with a similar bill called the Protect IP Act (PIPA) up for consideration in the United States Senate.  These bills each individually have the power to gut the internet as it currently functions, with disastrous consequences for the global economy, worldwide communications, and world diplomacy.  These consequences unfortunately seem to be either not fully understood or not comprehended by lawmakers, and I strongly urge any readers in the United States to contact your Representatives and Senators and instruct them to vote against their respective bills.

Rep. Lamar Smith, author of SOPA

Economically speaking, the bill is a disaster waiting to happen, at a time when the United States is already doing everything it possibly can to avoid falling back into a recession.  The rest of the world's economy is in a similarly bad state, built as it has been (in large part) for the last thirty years on ever-growing American consumerism.  I'll save greater economic analyses for another time, and keep things relevant here: this bill would greatly strengthen copyright holders' abilities to track down and harm violators, but the bill does so in such a way that many innocent people will similarly be harmed, a thought which I as an American citizen find to be directly in contradiction of everything this nation portends to stand for-- "innocent until proven guilty" is one of the most sacred legal traditions here, and for good reason.

SOPA allows copyright holders and the US Department of Justice to get court orders for any of the following:

1. Force advertising networks, payment facilitators (PayPal, and its ilk), and (as I understand it) credit card companies to stop doing business with sites accused of violating US intellectual property rights laws, financially strangling such companies by blocking the payment methods.

2. Block search engines (like Google) from linking to said pages, further harming the sites by preventing the vast majority of internet users from even knowing it exists.  This is less a problem for major websites, such as Wikipedia, the existence of which is common knowledge, but is a much greater threat to businesses and any non-superpower-sized website

3. Force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block all traffic to the sites.  This is an especially frightening possibility, as it means the site is now cut off from any computer not local to its servers, preventing the rest of the world from accessing it.

The (economic) problem here is that e-commerce is a large (and rapidly growing) part of the world economy, especially in developed countries like the United States.  Amazon.com, an online retailer which is likely to be less affected (though not by any means unaffected) by this bill than many other companies, had an operating revenue of 32 billion (32B) US Dollars last year, an incredible fortune; a smaller website, Netflix, which would almost certainly have to tighten its membership requirements and the fraction of the library available, therefore being likely to be much more affected by the bill, had an operating revenue of 2B USD in its own right. 

Part of the problem is that any site which allows users to upload their own content, which is to say, nearly all of the sites which have created the internet as we now know it, will need to start being absolutely certain their users really do own the copyrights to whatever content they're putting up, likely destroying most of the Netflixes, the DeviantArts, and any other similar sites out there.  And really, can the world afford to lose (potentially) trillions of dollars of e-commerce at a time like the present?

This content-monitoring brings me to the next problem, though:  all it takes is an accusation of wrongdoing for the Justice Department to start turning the wheels, without requiring that any notice be given to the owners of the sites accused.  It is my opinion that this violates the United States Constitution in that it denies the accused the right to face their accuser.  What's worse is that since the Justice Department can (and may be obligated to, I'm not certain) start taking action immediately upon an accusation, this could easily become in practice if not in theory full-blown censorship of sections of the web, violating the United States' sacred First Amendment-- that of freedom of speech and expression.  Imagine, if you will, a Chinese (or British, or Saudi, or whomever you please) company which accuses a competitor of violating intellectual property law on the competitor's website.  The Justice Department could instantly take action, potentially affecting a company anywhere in the world effectively on hearsay.  Even if the competitor eventually got things sorted out, they would likely lose a great deal of time, energy, money, and consumer goodwill (as they received so much bad press) dealing with the investigation, allowing the accusing company to leapfrog them.

The US Governement is not, and should not behave as, a tool for corporations and commerce wars.

Diplomatically speaking, this provides the opportunity even for governments to take actions as outlined above, advancing the interests of nationalized industries (such as, perhaps, Russia's Gazprom) at the expense of competitors (ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, etc.).  Though I have chosen large companies as examples here, they are actually less likely to be damaged by this act; I chose them for the same reason they'd be relatively protected-- they're well known.  

A number of companies including, although certainly not limited to, Google, Mozilla (makers of Firefox), Twitter, Tumblr, KickStarter, the Wikimedia Foundation (operators of Wikipedia), the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Microsoft have all publicly declared opposition to this bill, with some going so far as to have already started building additional anticensorship infrastructure, such as that used to support the Arab Spring.

While these bills are well intended, hoping to protect the interests of intellectual property owners, they are so ham-fisted about their efforts that they will do immeasurably more harm than good.  It is not unreasonable to think that a sort of intellectual property war is on its way, with the Internet as we know it both the battleground, and the prize.  There is little argument that American copyright law desperately needs revision in the age of the Internet, but few seem to want to acknowledge this fact on Capitol Hill; ultimately, however, it is my opinion that the only way forward which does not directly threaten the rights and liberties of all those on the internet is a revised copyright law.  The alternative, it seems, is a balkanized Internet, where people can no longer speak to those significantly different, or learn from them.  That is, if any Internet remains at all.