I'll believe it when I see it. I just don't believe the US government wants to shut down Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, and all of the other major sites the alarmists are claiming.
But SOPA would open these sites up to problems that would be enforced by law, and which would cause them much harm, quite possibly to the extent of them shutting down.
The politicians either don't understand these problems, or don't care about them - you can be the judge on that.
Now, the criteria is that the site is "dedicated to the theft of US property", but advertising agencies and payment processors are held immune to liability for actions they take under the law, so they have no reason to verify that the site is, in fact, dedicated to theft before shutting it down.
There does not need to be an active government conspiracy for this to harm websites.
The conspiracy theory is that the unintended consequences are in fact intended by the MPAA/RIAA. Given their past and present behavior, it's not a stretch.
There were never claims that the DMCA would literally shutdown sites like youtube and reddit. But the criticisms of it certainly seem justified in hindsight.
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/12/18/1836249/sopa-cre...
The politicians simply know SOPA will never be invoked against those sites because they play nice (as an example. see google giving UMC a private way to remove youtube videos). It will be invoked on thepiratebay, etc. and any other site someone decides they don't like or doesn't play nice.
Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Youtube, because it had so many of its videos posted by users. Also, other sponsors of SOPA, such as NBC, would've wanted Youtube dead, too. After all, the only reason they started Hulu was to fend off Youtube, even though they didn't like having Hulu at all, since it undermines their real cash cow, the old traditional business model.
One thing that has been confusing me during the course of the proceedings is that it has been repeatedly suggested that SOPA will be only affecting foreign websites. Is this not actually the case? Or are people more concerned with the precedent that will be established?
The Government doesn't care, and the sites will go because it will be too expensive or impossible for them to monitor user-generated content.
> One thing that has been confusing me during the course of the proceedings is that it has been repeatedly suggested that SOPA will be only affecting foreign websites. Is this not actually the case?
Wrong. It will also affect foreign websites because ICANN controls the DNS system.
See title I sec 102. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c112:1:./temp/~c1124uh...:
Is this only a piece of the larger picture?
edit: On further inspection, it appears as though title 2 does in fact grant powers for combatting domestic sites as well.
Or at least the language isn't explicitly speaking to foreign websites.
So any question that starts with "Do you really think they intend…" is a red herring.
The law - as it is written - can be used to shutdown sites like Reddit. There is nothing stopping someone using it in that way, even if it isn't the governments intention.