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Comment by tmcw | Hacker News Reader

> Opponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act, the bill that threatens to block large swathes of foreign websites for alleged copyright infringement, have complained that Congress has yet to hear their voice.

Foreign websites? This, combined with the fact that they're referred to once as 'haters' and twice as 'nerds', makes me think that Forbes is worthless at writing about anything except how rich blue-chip CEOs are.

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Not defending Forbes, but the bill was amended to only apply to sites outside US jurisdiction.

"Lamar’s amendments also clarify that sites ending in .com, .org and .net are not covered by the bill. Only foreign sites fall under SOPA’s wrath."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/sopa-watered-down-a...

It's not a coincidence that the amendment only exempts domains that the US can already censor via ICE. Hardly a concession at all, really.

http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/1011/101129washington.htm

So co.uk sites are a go. Please explain what gives US the right to do that? Especially without due process.

Why wouldn't they have the right? The DNS servers in question are physically in US territory. And due process is part of the bill: in the current version a domain takedown requires a court order. Weak protection to be sure, given the army of lawyers the MPAA has lined up and the tendency of some judges to rubber-stamp legitimate-seeming orders, but not strictly speaking a due-process issue.

IANA is only under (US-based) ICANN control because of the grudging agreement of the rest of the world. There have been arguments to remove control over the DNS root from US jurisdiction, but each time the US Government and ICANN have promised not to do something like SOPA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_zone_file#Root_server_sup...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Corporation_for_Assig...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Auth...

Why wouldn't they have the right? The DNS servers in question are physically in US territory.

Well in the US we have this thing called "constitutional rights" which say, among other things, that Congress shall make no law "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press".

Laws blocking results returned from a DNS server is just about the closest thing imaginable to "abridging a press" in the 21 century.

A domain takedown, sure, but not a payment-processing and ad-serving ban, which may as well be a takedown for 99+% of sites.

That actually comes far closer the censorship measures currently being considered across the middle-east, not to mention China's Great Firewall.

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