Of course, in ten years time it could have an industry-wide chilling effect much like the DMCA, however in the meantime that will not happen. That's not how you introduce creeping, malicious legislation, and the folks responsible for this know that, of course.
Seriously, though, I agree. A company should not make politics corollary to their brand name. If Google takes a stand on things by taking advantage of its vast user base, it will be disingenuous. A blog post is one thing. Plastering a message across their header on the home page is far different. Most Google messages are fairly innocuous, holiday themed graphics. There is a time and a place for political infrastructure, and it is not the same as for the corporate infrastructure. This is why SOPA is a problem in the first place - corporations and politics becoming intertwined in unproductive and abusive ways. You make a stand outside your brand, and you do it with integrity by not forcing it upon your user base. I agree with the theme that SOPA is bad, but I don't think it'd be good for Google to fight by putting it on their webpage.
Mozilla, I can see. Yahoo! I can't. Reddit, I can see. Google, again, I can't. Different kinds of traffic, different amounts, and different audiences.
Am I reading the bill in an overly alarmist way? It sounded to me like SOPA would make YouTube basically impossible to run.
I have a two year old son. He loves Thomas The Tank Engine. And he loves Youtube and will frequently ask for "Thomas on the laptop". Most of the Thomas related videos on Youtube are actually re-enactments using the toy trains rather than copies of the TV show. There's apparently a whole community around this - with movies ranging from shaky clips of a kid playing to elaborate productions trying (though usually failing badly) to get close to the production values of the original series.
Some of them use snippets of the music from the TV show - how much is too much? Some use music I can't place - copyrighted or not? I can't tell. Some of them re-use dialogue. Some use text from the books. Others have invented their entirely own stories (but might still run afoul of copyright because they use the characters). Some has as their only similarly that they use the train sets as props.
The question is, how many of these would a court find infringing? (how many should they find infringing in a reasonable world?).
The end result is that to protect themselves legally, they'll need to reject everything that even has the appearance of being infringing.
This will likely throw out a massive amount of non-infringing content as well as a lot of stuff that is in a grey area legally but that the public will find ridiculous that they have to block. Vetting it will be far too hard
Of course, this latter part is perhaps the biggest light at the end of the tunnel: The chilling effect on speech are so strong and so far overreaching due to the lack of legal safeguards, that I can't imagine SCOTUS not throwing out substantial parts of this law.
The DNS blocking is only available to federal law enforcement; a private complaint can't pull DNS under any circumstance.
2. It is available to federal law enforcement.
May be I'm just being cynical, but there seems to be an obvious way around fact 1. using fact 2.
money == power; gov officials seem to be willing to go to ANY length, given enough Shift+444