Senate bill amounts to death penalty for Web sites | Hacker News Reader

Senate bill amounts to death penalty for Web sites

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124 pointsgrellas51 comments

This bill will be used to censor any form of information and data on the internet. Whether it be legal or not. It will be used as a tool to threaten and intimidate people, organizations and corportaions. It will be used by government agencies against other organizations/corps and people. Think of this as the "watchlist" currently used by the TSA. This bill is not harmless. America is no longer the symbol of freedom and truth it once stood for. Americans are not free any more.

This is certainly a way to go about taking websites off of the most commonly used web. And cutting off ad funding is like strangling them. But this power can very well be misused and used to quiet organizations. I dont believe the government should have the power to dictate who is allowed to do business with who. Also filtering DNS is only a precursor of what is to come with internet censorship.

Could you imagine if corporations were required to blacklist all companies that had done anything illegal? Everything would crumble. This is such a ridiculous idea.

Especially because the government dictates what is considered illegal. Should I welcome us to china?

What? Now, I don't support internet censorship, but unless you support anarchy, who do you expect to decide on laws? That's a fairly large part of what governments are meant to do.

I think his point was that since the government creates laws, and companies could deal with other companies that broke those laws, the government could destroy any corporation it wanted, at any time.

Not that it can't do so now, but it's a lot harder to blind the public about it, and it would take quite a bit longer. With this law, it would be an overnight thing.

This law is terrible, yes, but the issue is with this law, not with the fact that the government "dictates what is considered illegal".

I understand the government always dictates what is considered legal/illegal, maybe I used the wrong wording. But My issue is that if they have the power to regulate the internet and what the internet displays, they have the ability to censor what every they like. If kept unmonitored this could threaten freedom of speech and press.

In that case apologies for misunderstanding, I read your comment as one of those generic pointless fuck the man comments that are normally written by 14 year olds. "Government making laws? WE'RE IN CHINA!" Understood now :)

The issue is that the executive branch is being granted broad judicial powers, much like with the Patriot act.

Good question, I never thought about it this way. Why does IP get such special protections? Why not blacklist companies that cheat on their taxes, or violate EPA regs?

> Why does IP get such special protections?

A lot of expensive lobbyists.

As soon as the door is opened to allow this for IP, everthing else will follow like a tidal wave.

Because copying and duplication of IP are trivially easy over the digital infrastructure. The shutdown measures are primarily injunctive rather than penal. Firms in other industries often have sanctions imposed on them as well, but they're not as obvious to those outside that industry.

Can? Will be misused.

Has been misused. They already falsely accused a great many sites of being associated with pedophilia in one of their domain seizures. And now they want to expand that program.

Here's EFF's take on the bill: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/protect-ip-act-coica-re...

I don't see how this is constitutional under the first amendment. Even if it passes, it will probably be overturned after wasting vast amounts of taxpayer and non-profit (ACLU, EFF) dollars.

I'm not sure how most of the DMCA is constitutional but there it is.

I agree with you, except for the part about "it will probably be overturned". I'm much more pessimistic.

Based on what happened to the gambling sites recently, I expect it to be used as a tool against adult content on the web because the politics are so easy.

yes that is a very valid point. In general non conforming content is endangered along with freedom of speech and press. See a couple of posts above

Implement vague and capricious laws that criminalize large swaths of the target population. Enforce them only against your enemies and use the threat of prosecution to eliminate dissent.

Except this death penalty we can fix by creating new protocols.

Good point as far as DNS access goes but new protocols won't get the sites advertising money or search engine views.

That's a secondary issue in the grand scheme of free speech.

It's also the kind of thing that the market is good at solving. E.g., the ad revenue business will simply leave the US like many others.

Is it time to build the darknet yet?

Maybe we should start a darknet DNS service

i2p and gnunet

##dns-p2p and #namecoin on freenode

Already exists. It's just waiting for population http://www.i2p2.de/

awesome. ill have to start messing with it

The site's not showing up...

so the darknet is working then?

http://freenetproject.org ? Also has the ability to run as a darknet, where only people you invite will even know the network exists.

It's strange that nobody already mentioned Tor and its hidden services:

https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en

I2P and Freenet aren't as widely used (AFAIK) and they are slower.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion

EDIT: There's also namecoin, that someone submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2546815

And the MafiaaRedirector Firefox extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-re...

[Warning: Snark] Will Google be forced to block youtube and remove advertising?

so people will just have to bookmark IP addresses if it comes down to it? and then someone will come up with an alternative to DNS that will help people remember these IP addressees... and then we'll have that new updated infrastructure for DNS we all wanted anyway?

it seems to be attacking everything but ISPs, so as long as the sites still have internet access, people will find a way around it.

I'd love to hear grellas' input on this (thanks for submitting the link btw).

In the longer run it seems likely to me that inexpensive subscription services are inevitable, and this will wind up being largely moot.

This is scary.

I run a popular forum on which users sometimes post links to copyrighted materials – despite the fact that it's explicitly against the rules. Because of this I occasionally receive DCMA takedown notices regarding links that were posted 3-5 months prior (even though the links are often expired by that time). The last time it happened my hosting company was involved and threatened to suspend my account in less than 48 hours if I did not comply (harsh).

How easily could this bill result in an innocent site (such as mine) being taken down? Obviously the bill describes "steps" that have to be taken up to that point, but considering I was less than 48 hours away from my site being suspended for a 3 month old expired link to a video, I don't have much faith in the people entrusted to make these decisions.

Besides, isn't the DMCA enough?

You were given 48 hours notice because that is what the DMCA dictates, not because your webhost were being dicks... They legally have to give you 48 hrs.

Isn't it awesome that the "democracy" can be bought by bribing a small number of politicians in charge. Whoever set that system up, didn't think it through.

This is a well known result of public choice theory.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html

Well, maybe this is not well known enough, because school civics lessons usually don't teach this. I'll refrain from speculating about what interest groups might be influencing the school curriculum.

As Winston Churchill said, "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill

Or as James Madison put it, "But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm

If it really becomes impossible for people to operate legitimate, opinion-promoting websites (as contrasted with copyright-infringing websites, which I don't operate), then the way out of the problem is the same as it has always been, people power.

http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations98ce.html

Well, there are many truly democratic systems that nobody has tried yet. For instance a system where any citizen can vote on any issue. To prevent the tyranny of the majority, there can be rules set up. A system where people decide where their taxes go, how much to spend on healthcare, science, education, warfare.

Initiative and referendum

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Initiative_and_referen...

are old ideas of the Progressive movement of a century ago, and they are blamed by some observers for the mess that California is now in.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2489519

Illinois is in an even worse mess and they don't have initiatives.

absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

California is nothing like what I described.

Other states have ballot / referendum and are doing pretty good. California is more a case study in "voting money to groups to elect me to vote for more money".

republics are a tad bit easier to buy off than actual democracies just because of the number of people you actually need to bribe.

Like all governments, it boils down to what the governed persons are willing to tolerate. As people become more complacent and idle, and as more people get their information from tainted sources, things only get worse. In general terms, a population deserves its government.

Isn't it awesome that the "democracy" can be bought by bribing a small number of politicians in charge. Whoever set that system up, didn't think it through.

"Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote. "

http://articles.latimes.com/1992-01-12/local/me-358_1_jail-t...

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