The Internet wins: SOPA has been shelved, but we must remain vigilant | Hacker News Reader

The Internet wins: SOPA has been shelved, but we must remain vigilant

extremetech.com

74 pointsmrsebastian16 comments

The timing of this withdrawal seems to fully indicate that the politicians involved have just tried to flush out their opposition and force them to play their hand.

Now Reddit, Wikipedia et al. will go dark, but they will not generate the support they could have if SOPA was still under debate. Now when someone sends a letter to their local politician, that politician will just send an automatic reply of "This isn't as issue, we're not even debating this right now, I don't know what you're talking about.", further confusing the public.

This is just a delay tactic being used to crush the groundswell around the current SOPA/PIPA bills. They'll come back when all opposition has faded away to a distant memory. Plus it gives the politicians who were involved plausible deniability on both sides; they're not dropping it, but they're not currently pursuing the matter either.

All that has happened is the following: the Congresscritters have decided that an overt, named, Internet censorship bill may not work.

Now look for SOPA to appear as a part of some defense spending bill, or the debt ceiling bill, or something like that.

Anyone else remember the land shark from the SNL of old? Yeah, SOPA/PIPA are the land sharks. They'll keep trying.

This is winning a battle, not a war. There is going to be more legislation, both in the US, and the World.

The internet is unique in that what makes it powerful is it's interconnectedness. It doesn't make sense for some nodes to have different rules than others. I believe the internet needs it's own bill of rights, but it should be presented in an international forum.

It's probably a pipe dream, but the idea of the US being able to take down international nodes by any method is devastating to me.

Exactly. We haven't won anything and treating it as a victory is dangerous. It turns us in to a boy cried wolf after we tell everybody it's OK to go home and put the pitchforks down. Only to start up the hysterics again the next time we face down dire straits.

We have the momentum, we have people's attention, we need to keep pushing. Keep organizing. Keep educating. We need to get our lobbying groups in to Washington and start influencing some legislation that works for The Internet. Not against it.

>>This is winning a battle, not a war. There is going to be more legislation, both in the US, and the World.<<

Good analogy. They are simply retreating to fight another day. And perhaps with more reinforcements and new lessons learned.

Leahy (PIPA sponsor) has announced that his chief of staff, Ed Pagano, is leaving to become Obama's liaison with the Senate. If you carefully read Leahy's press release and Obama's Response to We the People Petitions, the only thing that either has backed off on is the DNS language. And is packet sniffing any better than DNS censoring for freedom on the Internet? I don't know.

Not saying that the vote will happen on Jan 24, but also not putting any money on its not happening. Both Pagano and Obama are basketball players, so keep your eyes on the ball.

Does this mean that Jan 18th is cancelled?

There is still PIPA out there. Basically the Senate version of SOPA. Just a change in focus is all that is needed.

The next battlefield will have a different terrain, I suspect if I wanted to censor the Web for political power I would strike next at the freedom to securely encrypt internet connections between devices. We need a right to bear encryption right next to a right to bear arms, so that a nation of citizens can mobilize to protect itself from an out of control government.

Neither a "right to bear arms" nor "free political speech/press" are actually all that protected by modern US jurisprudence. ("political" is important - pornography does have significant protections, far more than political speech.)

What political speech exactly is censored in the US today?

> What political speech exactly is censored in the US today?

Take out an ad about a candidate and you'll find out.

There's a whole federal bureaucracy, the FEC, devoted to regulating political speech. Many states (and some cities) also have campaigning laws.

Citizens United changed this somewhat but ....

And most of the rest of the world doesn't have a right to bear arms.

That's not the point. The right to bear arms is part of the founding document that had to be written for the colonies to even sign the Constitution. Without every right in the Bill of Rights, we would never have been a nation.

It doesn't matter if the rest of the world doesn't have this right. What matters is that we do, and any prohibition of it is evidence that the government is overstepping its bounds and performing unconstitutional acts by restricting us in ways explicitly disallowed.

Your first sentence, IMHO, is a bit historically inaccurate. Have you heard of the Articles of Confederation?

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

My apologies. I suppose I gave more credit to something that, while deserving a lot of credit, wasn't actually as important as I made it out to be (it's still incredibly important, though)

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