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Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

That's not nuclear.

Nuclear would be: you vote for SOPA you will be blacklisted from ever using google, gmail, facebook, twitter, aws. Your campaign, personal, and business websites will never appear in google searches. Your books will never be sold on amazon. You will never be allowed to have a google account, upload videos to youtube, or own an android device.

That is nuclear.

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I don't dislike fighting dirty when it really counts, but realistically this strategy would never work. First, such actions would not stand long-term, because the government can merely prohibit withholding services from government agents, and sanction any companies who do. You delist certain senators from google? That is (insert violation of law or ethics here, real or conjured), you are fined $1 million a day until you de-de-list us. And they could make the fine as big as they wanted, and google (or whomever) would buckle. Make no mistake: the government has the power over long-term behavior, not corporations. And second, the government knows such a boycott would not be able to stand up against their power, that it is an idle threat, and so they would call their bluff and vote for SOPA anyway.

You can't win a fight by threatening to beat the bully up tomorrow and the next day and the next day for taking your lunch money today. You have to win the fight now, before the damage is done.

Add in the additional problem that it is much easier to pass (or block) legislation before it passes than it is to repeal, and I don't think this strategy is viable. If it were, google and other companies could get together now and force the repeal of legislation already in place that is distasteful. How likely is that? On the other hand, the original nuclear strategy mentioned in the article would indubitably have an immediate and unbelievably tremendous impact. We're talking shock and awe here, folks. If google didn't work for a day, every voting person in America would know about it.

And that's the way they pass legislation that the majority of people wouldn't like if they knew the truth about it -- by sneaking it through because, frankly, most people are just too busy or too apathetic to not fall asleep when someone mentions the word "politics". The actual nuclear strategy mentioned in the article would certainly wake them up, and in a big way.

That said, unfortunately I doubt google or any other publicly traded company has the balls to do it.

What if, hypothetically, a majority of shareholders wanted a publicly traded company to do it? Do you think it would happen then?

Up-sticks and move the corporation to another country. Some of them will probably have to do that anyway if SOPA passes.

I believe there is a way around this. Google doesn't need to hide or remove pro-SOPA search results. Making them harder to find would be equally effective. Something like this perhaps?

    In order to show you the highest quality results, we have omitted some entries.
    If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

I don't like this stance at all. Give the user free access to information, even if you don't like that information, you need to serve it just the same. You won't find any compelling arguments about SOPA on anti-SOPA sites, you need to go to pro-SOPA sites for pro-SOPA material and anti-SOPA sites for anti-SOPA material :/ They misrepresent each other (and sometimes themselves) because of their biases. For an informed decision, you need all the information.

Yes, that is exactly what we should do to oppose a censorship bill.

Sometimes you have to show people why their way is wrong by using it on them.

So, would you guys be okay with google blacklisting sites they disagree with politically? I'm pretty sure we would generally crucify google for doing that, but is SOPA bad enough for this to be an exception?

Google can do whatever they want (and probably will), and I can respond however I want if they do something I don't like.

So this is, uh, "fight terror with terror"?

To clarify: I don't necessarily support these actions as a response to SOPA (although SOPA is a pretty aggressive attack on civil liberties). I'm merely pointing out some examples of what SOPA opponents could actually do if they decided to employ a "burn the fields, salt the earth" strategy.

Nuclear would also include Danica Patrick.

It wouldn't?

And call me unreasonable if you like, but if this thing passes, and they haven't gone nuclear (or some variation thereof), as far as I'm concerned, they are endorsing it.

There are a few times when you have to take a stand. This is one of them.

None of the airlines opposed the TSA like they should have, and I stopped flying american carriers as a result, except where there's literally no other option.

I won't have a problem ending all association with Google, Amazon, Facebook or Twitter.

For many of these sites, that definition of "going nuclear" would already be them giving up, or at least fundamentally changing. Google blocking sites that they disagree with politically would (and should) be protested by all of us, yet that's exactly what this would be.

I would be concerned about any of these services using their platforms to promote political agendas (especially those with dominant positions). Do it once and you become a Murdoch or one of the many other media barons.

How about Apple and Microsoft and Adobe? And 37signals and foursquare and Dropbox and AirBnB and literally every other company that has an internet presence and doesn't go nuclear to support this bill?

Start a new Internet.

Is that impossible? Isn't it just a matter of running a root nameserver for the new internet?

It depends what you mean by "new internet," and how much control the government eventually takes over the actual hardware routing the current Internet. Even If the government owns every ISP, you could take part in encrypted communication, and I don't think there's any way for them to stop that. At the absolute worst, you could go back to basics, and just use the plain old telephone system to dial into known servers.

".. government owns every ISP, you could take part in encrypted communication, and I don't think there's any way for them to stop that.."

Sure they could: just disallow any "unknown" encrypted communication. For example requiring the en/decryption to happen at the ISP or only allowing traffic they can decrypt and check.

(I'm not saying this is likely, but it could be implemented and most folks wouldn't care)

> Sure they could: just disallow any "unknown" encrypted communication.

Even then, it's impossible to prevent arbitrary communication. You can always hide your message inside of allowed messages (steganography), or an even more basic albeit inefficient technique: just use the timing between allowed messages to encode your hidden message.

How do you trivially decide what's an encrypted file, and what's simply a highly compressed gzip archive?

You err on the side of "it's encrypted, and you're under arrest." False positives aren't the "bad guy's" concern.

Not particularly serious. A little maybe.

In such a situation, the upcoming SOGA (Stop Online Gzips Act) shall provide a reliable decidability methodology.

No, the nuclear option would be if the group created a device that produced a cascading fission reaction, destroying Washington. I think it's unlikely at this point, but SOPA is an existential threat.

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