Google: Financial Embargo Of WikiLeaks Shows How To Deal With Piracy

I was kind of disappointed to hear that from a Google representative. I get the feeling that Google cares only about covering their own asses, so even if Congress votes an "evil" bill like this one, it's not their problem as long as it doesn't affect them directly.

Which is fine, I suppose. You can't expect much more from a corporation. But this is why I wanted an organization like EFF to be present at the hearing. Someone who would actually care about other things, like Internet liberties, besides protecting their own profits.

But those managing the hearing don't seem to care about issues like these at all. All they care about if whether the bill helps protect some jobs on one side (pro-SOPA) or helps destroy others or destroy new businesses (anti-SOPA).

The Internet is much more than a zero-sum game regarding jobs, and the Government shouldn't be in the business of favoring one industry's jobs over the other. Let them deal with their problems themselves, and not use tax payer money to fix their problems, and kill or cripple another industry in the process - without even mentioning all those liberty and censorship issues.

I agree 100% with the last paragraph:

"The EFF’s Trevor Timm said he was overall happy with Google’s arguments in the hearing, but he thought the use of WikiLeaks as an example and the company’s focus on “following the money” revealed that it was more interested in its own search business than in freedom of speech.”They seemed to be endorsing the way that payment processors and advertisers should be censoring sites,” said Timm. ”I think it really shows why they should have had more of a representation of people at the hearing. Google is looking out for its interests, but we’re looking out for the interest of everyone on the Internet. Categorizing Wikileaks as a rogue site isn’t something we agree with.”"

"dont cut their websites, cut their food supply"

sound better to me, but not good. i don't think its normal to cut ANY such service without a prior trial.

Be it your bank account or website. What about just expulsion from your own house? coming next, maybe. Welcome to the world where corporations control every bit, and where you don't own anything, you're merely licensed to use it, be it software of physical items (so again, house, or anything else)

It's interesting that by threatening to attack both DNS records and payment processing without a trial or judicial review, everyone has jumped on board the "compromise" that they are willing to accept payment processing take downs of free speech sites without judicial review as long as the DNS records can be saved. Which were never a real issue anyway since you can just switch to offshore DNS servers, or switch to raw ip addresses as most of us did when wikileaks.org was taken out.

It seems to me this has been the goal since the beginning. If the bill was only about attacking the finances of sites, the discussion here would have been about how this is an attack on free speech. By bundling it with another issue to be given up as a token sacrifice, a goal they weren't even really interested in to begin with, they are able to get the public to support and even advocate their original goal, which otherwise few would have been in favor of.

Actually, this is great. If visa/mastercard/banks etc will start blocking heavily every shady business, these businesses will have to move to bitcoin and other non-goverment-controlled currencies/payment systems. In the long run this benefits us all.

First, is this realistic? Most torrent sites advertise porn or malware, which none of the big advertising companies serve anyway. Wikileaks doesn't use advertising, but by popular demand they may raise money in any possible way, even in cash from selling t-shirts. Very weak argument from Google

If we were to clamp down on the Credit-card based revenue streams, that these sites will simply switch to Bincoin... (Which is fine with me, FWIW)

I was watching the stream and my jaw dropped when I heard Oyama make the reference to Wikileaks.

I think she was making the point that strangling the finances of "rogue" parties is very effective, and how Wikileaks was handled is a textbook example of that strategy in action.

I doubt she thought it was right or ethical. She said elsewhere in the hearing that Google supports cutting off finances with direction from courts. In any case, it does prove her point that cutting off finances is an effective strategy and can already be done without SOPA (or other new legislation).

The problem with such proposals is the unfairness of it.

I mean, OK, you want to "protect IP", but in case of a false positive add a note in there that the complainer should pay the affected party a sum proportional to the complainer's market cap, such as this (numbers pulled from my ass, but you get the point):

     - Microsoft: 1 billion USD
     - MPAA: 1 billion USD
     - RIAA: 500 million USD

There you go. All is fair.

Let's assume this is a viable method. Is this method scalable? It took concerted effort by many financial institutions and gov'ts in order to pull that off. And that was probably helped by the strong motivation afforded by their anti-cause.

I don't see similar herculean efforts to deal with ordinary piracy, unless a framework were set-up. Would a society benefit from such a pan-national behemoth (assuming it would necessitate one)?

If we were to clamp down on the Credit-card based revenue streams, these sites will simply switch to Bincoin... (Which is fine with me, FWIW)