Sen. Ron Wyden: PIPA/SOPA Is a Congressional Wake-Up Call | Hacker News Reader

Sen. Ron Wyden: PIPA/SOPA Is a Congressional Wake-Up Call

wired.com

64 pointsttt_29 comments

During an election, it may not always be clear which candidate voters will choose, but it is absolutely certain that those candidates need a lot of money just to get on the ballot. As a result, the U.S. government's course has been charted by lobbyists and their money for a very long time now, and that isn't likely to change unless the U.S. starts capping campaign contributions per donor like other nations do. (This is actually a very good idea!) So how important is public opinion really? Not very important at all, in the long run. Yes, PIPA/SOPA met heavy opposition, but will the same bill with a different name get the same response next year? How about the year after? What about a dozen different bills that incorporate all the bits and pieces of SOPA/PIPA separately? Paid lobbyists will always win in the long run.

Internet companies like google are being threatened with crushing government regulations just as Hollywood was in the 1920's. Hollywood's response was a combination of heavy lobbying and just barely enough self-regulation, in the form of the production code, to escape government regulation. The code was abandoned in the 60's, but Hollywood hasn't let up lobbying since. It's arguable that they have actually achieved a form of regulatory capture when it comes to copyright laws. e.g. The funny coincidence between how long copyrights last and the age of Mickey Mouse.

The real wake-up call that SOPA/PIPA has provided is not to the public, the government, or to the MPAA/RIAA. It's to companies that rely on the internet for their revenue. That revenue dwarfs Hollywood. Literally. Regardless of what the public wants or what lobbyists say, legislation like SOPA/PIPA would have a far larger negative impact on the U.S. economy than burning Hollywood to the ground. So why aren't there lobby groups sticking up for internet freedom? Why was PIPA/SOPA only stopped by a grass-roots movement? The money is there. Far more than the MPAA or RIAA could ever muster in fact.

My prediction is this: ISP's, google, etc. now know that Hollywood is gunning for them. They're going to fight back with their own lobbyists, and they have a lot more money. The next decade is going to be dark indeed for the MPAA/RIAA. They have awoken a juggernaut.

The problem is those lobbying money keep rising up, too. From what I hear Obama plans on raising $1 billion for his re-election campaign. That means in the future other candidates will try to raise a lot more, too, and so on.

This is bad. I think we need to limit how much any single individual or entity can pay for a campaign. Elections shouldn't be decided by who raises the most money, and according to a statistic 98% of those who won elections also had the most money. I really believe that needs to end somehow.

Unlimited donations from single individuals/companies just means that much more power will held by those single individuals and companies, and you can bet that the first thing the politicians will do when they get in office is to pay back thoe money.

But that would abridge our first amendment rights, because money is speech. Although for some reason, the police didn't see it that way when I tried $100 worth of talking a lady on the street corner into going on a date with me.

> While some have derided the events of last week as a departure from the way we do things in Washington

What? Who?

> If members of Congress better understood the digital world, they would know that downloading a digital good from a foreign site is no different than importing goods from a foreign country

WHAT? HOW?

Note: I realise this is supposed to be one of the good guys who gets it. This makes that second statement all the more worrying!

Can you be a bit more specific about the latter? I don't really get what's so wrong with that.

From the recipient's perspective, the two are pretty drastically different.

Importing goods from a foreign country involves some rather substantial regulatory burdens along with the more mundane timing/transportation issues associated with the travel distance.

Pulling data off a foreign website is no different for the recipient than it is anywhere else. Even the issues created by the physical distance are relatively minor. This comparison doesn't recognize that difference.

What? Who? - Most of the lobbying groups and SOPA/PIPA congressional sponsors. Most overtly Mr. Dodd. I assume he is referring to first hand rumblings from his peers. But, there has been a lot of detractors about the events, just not in the pro groups with which we can sometimes self relegate to.

What? How? - Taking that sentence without the following is out of context. He was making a economic theory correlation not a literal comparison, in an effort to lead into the follow on sentence.

I'll tell you what should be a huge wake up call to most congressmen: When I was petitioning my 2 senators on PIPA, I found that their web form for constituents to submit letters were truly terrible. Each one required that I pick a category for my letter. Only one of my two senators even had "Technology" as a category that I could choose for submitting a letter.

One of my senators, Richard Blumenthal, had no category for Technology or the Internet. I had to file my letter under "Other." When a US senator doesn't even have an option for his constituents to talk to him about the Internet, you know they just don't understand technology. The Internet is probably by now the largest conduit through which money flows globally, outside of ForEx. These dinosaurs ignore it at their own peril.

Congressional job approval rating has been hovering around 10% for quite some time. Worse than Nixon during Watergate. The powerful incumbents responsible for the clusterfuck will remain in power. The swing seats will continue to be passed back and forth, perhaps a bit more quickly. That is the nature of our two-party republic.

We need term limits so badly. Most any business would atrophy with the same leadership for 3 decades.

But how much of a difference would term limits make and how?

I've always felt a little conflicted regarding term limits. While they are one possible solution for cutting dead weight, the problem is you also end up needlessly firing people who do a good job.

Not to mention there won't be much of an incentive to work better (at least when they near their end of term).

To play devil's advocate: potentially that just means that elected officials would spend more effort running for different positions. House reps. near their term limits would be more likely to run for senate. Senators would run for governor/president. Etc.

The other issue I didn't like was you eventually wind up with someone who knows that even if they do the best job ever, they can't be re-elected. The capitalist in my cringes at the thought.

While multiple terms definitely incentivize, it also presents the problem of forcing the politicians to begin campaigning for their next term while still in office (quite possibly hindering performance). Maybe the best solution from an economist's prospective would be to leave out the term limits but to somehow boost the popularity of recall elections.

There are so few cases of people doing a good job over a long period of time, I'm willing to take that trade-off. However, I do think campaign finance reform should come first. Let's see what happens if politicians are really beholden to th people.

That's why we vote. If my district wants someone as their representative, who are you to say no? Yes, if you don't like your representative, you can work to change that.

It's not the best solution, but it's better then the alternative.

/s/term limits/meaningful campaign finance regulations/

Both of those are just treatments of symptoms.

One core problem is that the government has too much power and too many fingers in too many pies. As long as it's possible to spend x dollars to influence congress and receive y>>x dollars in benefit (through budget spending or favorable regulation) then that sort of thing will always happen, regardless of whether those x dollars are funneled through campaign finance or through other sorts of "influence".

The other core problem is the electoral climate. The evolution of the news media and its influence on the voting public has left us with a campaign system that filters out a lot of the best candidates and leaves us with the sort of dreck we're used to seeing fill up congress. Running for office is a nightmare these days, so most sane people avoid it. But that leaves only a few of the most dedicated public servants (who are all too rare) and a much greater proportion of folks seeking office for all the wrong reasons (vanity, kickbacks, power, etc.)

If we implemented term limits and stringent campaign finance limits tomorrow we'd still be left with the same shitty crop of corrupt and/or glory seeking politicians we have today, it would just be a more frequently turning over crop.

The government will always attract people and organizations who want to abuse its power to enrich or otherwise benefit themselves. Other industrialized countries do a better job than the US of keeping those people in check and keeping the government more-or-less on task.

Care to bolster your claim with evidence? I believe other industrialized nations are at best on par with the US in terms of corruption, if not worse. In the last decade there have been several major corruption scandals in France, the UK, Italy, Canada, and elsewhere.

Here's a few examples:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,791113,00....

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/02/17/us-italy-corruptio...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16194089

The "corruption perception index" is one measure of corruption, and shows the US as being in the middle of the pack in terms of corruption relative to the G8 overall: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

While the coalition governments that arise in a proportional representation setting have their own sets of problems, a fairly significant number of studies have shown that PR systems increase both voter turnout and voter satisfaction.

I often see people deriding the two party system in the US, but rarely any mention of different ways of doing elections. It's certainly not unprecedented for a country to switch from a first past the post system to a PR system. Additionally, the US House of Representatives seems particularly well suited for elections by proportional representation.

C'mon, everyone understands "the central role that the Internet plays in their constituents’ lives", more or less. What they don't understand is how the Internet _works_. I doubt that before last week there weren't more than a dozen Congressmen who could explain DNS, never mind think through the implications of filtering. All of that was for the "experts", whom Congress turned to for "assurances" that everything would be okay. The media were scarcely better.

So they're no better than their experts, who are, hello, conflicted, or / and cherry-picked by conflicted players.

If we really want to get out of this lobbying complex, we might insist that our representatives demonstrate some actual knowledge before they legislate.

I certainly hope so. Thankfully, the cat is out of the bag on the US Government (and most government's, it seems) shutting down or controlling the internet.

Congress isn't like a business with a bad review. It's like a business with a bad review and they can censor the medium where the bad review appears.

And this shows further why Congress would want to restrict access by the people to the Internet. If they can get control in place that makes it like cable news where unpopular opinions are buried or shouted off the Net then they can pass SOPA, PIPA, NDAA, ACTA, or whatever the hell else they want without people having the Internet to inform them what is going on.

The presence of the Internet didn't do anything for the NDAA, and it didn't do anything for ACTA until it was too late. The revolt we saw on the web over SOPA/PIPA was unique.

Anonymous was up in arms over ACTA years ago, but we didn't achieve much beyond taking down a few sites for a day or so and making a few videos whose grandiosity would have made Newt proud. If we really want to ensure that the Internet can be mobilized again, we would do well to analyze the last mobilization and determine what made it different. Here's my stab at it:

1) A lot of people were pissed off about SOPA for a long time before the blackout. SOPA stories started to dominate Reddit and HN, and Wikipedia was talking about a blackout long before anyone else did.

2) Engagement from politicians like Wyden, Issa, and Lundgren with SOPA detractors when all seemed lost gave hope, and made it seem like it was possible to have an effect. We would do well to keep lines of communication with these officials open, and repay their hard work when election time rolls around.

3) Popular opinion coalesced around a blackout long before any site had announced one. SOPA detractors were talking about how to get big sites to particilate in a blackout way back in early December.

4) Someone set a damned date. Though it was widely ridiculed on HN, some random redditor said, "we're doing it on January 18", and that was that. The moderators of r/SOPA agreed to black out that subreddit on the 18th, then when it was announced that Alexis would be testifying before congress on the 18th, the reddit admins followed suit. Setting a date on reddit finally kicked the Wikipedia discussions into high gear, and the rest of the dominos followed.

5) We had public figureheads like Alexis and Jimmy Wales to liaison with Old Media and congress. The importance of this can't be overstated. Alexis put a (freakishly tall and charismatic) face on the internet, and we can't ignore the effect of that on old media.

6) Obvious, but worth noting: we had large organizations participating. People at those organizations semi-independently decided that a blackout was a good idea, and some announced they were taking action long before it was what all the cool kids were doing. Special props to Ben Huh on this; the Cheezburger network was one of the first outside of reddit and Wikipedia to join the blackout.

7) The owner-as-user: thousands of smaller sites, whose owners/operators are far more Internet addict than industry titan, decided to put their livelihood on the line and join the blackout. This one will hit the game theory wonks hard, as it's the complete opposite of the Tragedy of the Commons. A bunch of people, whose independent actions wouldn't have made much difference, acted together to have a huge impact. They acted against their own individual self-interest (the blackout wouldn't have noticed their absence if they didn't participate) in pursuit of the common good. This is both laudable and noteworthy.

8) Perhaps most worryingly, the blackout was unprecedented. This means it will likely be exceedingly difficult to do again. The impact of any future action will likely be greatly reduced as it won't have the same novelty. We're really going to have to find a way around this if we plan on being able to rally the troops for a future fight.

Congress wants tax revenue on websites hosted in foreign countries. The website hosting the site will be taxed on click through and the Web will have more "this site is not available in your country" messages. This is how net neutrality dies in the night. Taxing IP by import duties and surcharges. We built the most powerful tool on the planet, and governments everywhere are trying to claim sole ownership of it so they can tax it and control it until it is as politically acceptible as fox news. My freedom to visit sites anywhere in the world will be going away. I suppose it is inevitible, humans in power are extremely territorial and don't like to share like the enlightened individuals who built the internet do.

A globally free medium of data exchange limited only by bandwidth mostly unhindered by any powerful nation will be an enlightened blip on the timeline of the human race.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com