Comment by chernevik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chernevik | Hacker News Reader

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Alexis never said why anyone should object to the bill. So what if it's completely circumventable? Saying stuff like "what concerns me most is it won't work" doesn't make sense -- isn't the most concerning thing DNS breakage? [EDIT: Concerning to everyday users. Me, I'm most worried about censorship -- but that is not the catchiest argumet.] And when Cotton says stuff like "that's wrong" -- twice -- Alexis has to explain how "that's right", quickly and unambiguously. Or the viewer will begin to presume that Cotton is right on the facts. Whereas if he's refuted, or has to explain the sense in which he's right, he's the one on the defensive.

Cotton knew his brief, and the presentation of that brief, much better than Alexis did his. Add in decades of political and rhetorical training and this isn't even a fair fight.

Guys like Cotton can be beaten, but only with 1) a much better case on the facts and 2) a complete mastery of the presentation of that case. This is a long way from home.

EDIT: One of the hardest things in what Alexis is doing is having people criticize how he's doing it. I congratulate him for putting himself out there for his principles and his community. He's up against people who have spent their entire lives training in interested (as opposed to principled) advocacy. He can be a lot better at this, and he can win -- after all, he's right! But he has to get a lot better at the execution.

> Alexis never said why anyone should object to the bill.

Exactly. Alexis was making an emotional appeal. "It scares me, it concerns me". Why? I'm most of the way through the debate and I didn't hear any arguments against Cotton's point.

Wikipedia seems to agree that it's only foreign sites:

> The bill would authorize the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders against websites outside U.S. jurisdiction accused of infringing on copyrights, or of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act#Contents

So what is the expected impact on US sites?

Wikipedia also seems to agree that the burden of the sanctions are quite high. There needs to be a court finding that a site is facilitating copyright infringement (perhaps not a full finding, like the closure of a case; but an intermediate finding).

Though I'm a technophile, I haven't followed this debate much at all until watching the MSNBC video. I found myself relatively influenced towards Cotton's side -- and a brief investigation seems to suggest that his points are correct. What am I missing?

I agree that, even if Cotton's points are true there may still be harmful consequences from the bill. But it seems we would be having an entirely different discussion depending on whether we agree on whether Cotton's points are factual.

I believe the answer is that the bill _targets_ foreign sites, but requires _domestic_ sites to obscure those targets. That's the sanction mechanism. Failure to comply creates liability.

This forces DNS nameservers into censorship administration.

It breaks DNS as users seek name service not engaged in censorship. That means fewer DNS servers, outside US territory, which means less cross-checking (ie, easier fraudulent imitation), less reliability and slower name service. It also means breaking security measures based on back-checking IP addresses with domain names.

EDIT: Those are the _technical_ problems. The civil liberties problem is the effective excommunication of bad actors, by some particular definition. People doing X are prevented from communicating with others. Well, here X is blatant and cynical copyright infringement. But what of X as incitement, or unpopular opinion? Even if the US were immune to such impulses, doing this for copyright gives China precedent for their censorship "in the interest of stability" and "to avoid irresponsible inaccuracy".

This bill also puts US companies at a serious disadvantage internationally. Imagine a Canadian Paypal. They wouldn't have restriction like this (yet, it will surely follow as the US puts a lot of pressure on Canada in these subjects). This would make the Canadian site a lot more attractive to both American and international customers. Paypal would suffer greatly.

A sorta reverse effect similar to this happened to Google in China. By standing up to the Chinese government Google had a disadvantage compared to the Chinese search engines and has be greatly affected by this over there.

The definition of foreign sites is also problematic. At this time the US government thinks it can seize any domain for which the top level domain administrator is in the US. Thus any site with a .ca, .is, .uk etc could be blocked by a weird definition of foreign. What I find funny is the use of the pirate bay as poster child of evil site. It's a .org domain it could be seize today. Wikileaks also a .org could have been seize by ICE (http://www.ice.gov/). ICE having that power is weird since they have gone after American sites.

Essentially the government can now block both American and soon Foreign sites if this bill goes into action. American Internet users are the ones who will suffer most by this. This affects Americans much more than international people.

Also, kn0thing should ask the guy next time if a Job in the entertainment business is worth more than one in other fields because this is what I feel they are saying.

I tend to disagree with the entire argument that it is OK because it is only going to target foreign sites.

The internet tends to be (or should be) borderless. What if the next Google or Facebook doesn't come from Silicon valley but instead from India? How do we already feel when foreign governments are blocking the current Google and Facebook?

I think the idea is that US sites are already subject to US jurisdiction. Lawsuits can be brought against them already. There is no need for something like SOPA because a restraining order issued by a court can already take a US website down.

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