The politicians will claim it is dead, then name it something else or not name it anything at all and just tack it onto the end of some other legislation and pass it when no one is watching.
In the USA, they're bought and paid for.
In the USA, they're bought and paid for.
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From wikipedia: In February 2011, despite "repeatedly and categorically insisting that he would not work as a lobbyist,"[22][23] [senator Chris] Dodd was identified by The New York Times as the likely replacement for Dan Glickman as chairman and chief lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).[24] The hiring was officially announced on March 1, 2011.[25]
When you're in politics, money is only good for one thing: buying votes. However, if a force stronger than free t-shirts and pens makes itself noticed, like mass-media reminding people how they got screwed, then interesting things can happen.
I think the main issue here with these people is that the Internet is not controlled so tightly as traditional media. And we are just starting to see the social effects.
Two party system, long term is only long enough for the other side to screw up, so 4 or 8 years tops.
And he would run into the exact same reality as Obama.
Granted, this guy is an ideologically pure multi term congressman loved by many people. But if Obama got gray hair from 4 years, I can only imagine what the congress is gonna do to this fiery fellow...
In democracy the mass-media has traditionally played the role of a fourth branch of government. However in recent times the traditional mass-media companies ended-up too controlled, either by owners that are also in politics, by legislation, or by the sheer pressure of catering to shareholders. But if you think about it, the social changes that the Internet has brought are only starting to emerge.
So IMHO, meet the new fourth branch of government: the Internet. And surely Internet companies can still be controlled, but the Internet is much more ethereal than traditional mass-media ever was and now the whole world is watching. Hello from Romania ;)
"I'm looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about."
As Clay Shirky observed, the response was "swift, voluminous, negative and incredulous."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/...
Within 24 Hours, Vanity Fair turned Brisbane from an object of outrage into one of sheer mockery.
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/01/Should-emVani...
But the most damning remarks came from readers themselves. The comments on Brisbane's post, and the one from Executive Editor Jill Abramson that followed, were absolutely incandescent.
So yes, the total implosion of the 4th Estate is coming into the open. And that's a very new development. That other big difference is that 10,000 calls to a Senator's office is a lot. So what happens if they ALL get 1,000,000? It's an absolutely off-the-charts response. You know there's opposition. You expect a few grenades to be tossed. Instead, a thermonuclear bomb detonates.
It's entirely possible that the response to Wikipedia's move will be the single largest driver of negative traffic in the history of Washington DC. It's the kind of searing experience that tells previously complacent politicians that, suddenly, they've got a major electoral issue. And not just on this one bill, but on literally everything they do.
I agree with folks who say this cannot end with the derailment of SOPA/PIPA. It has to continue until the flow of campaign cash from lobbyists ends, and the revolving door is welded shut.
The most likely move is to slip this authority into a defense/anti-terror bill. It'd be a fairly straightforward exercise in legalese to create wording that grants the government the right to blacklist domains/addresses under the auspices of fighting terrorism.
And while the wording will suggest terrorism, it will be sub-defined to cover illegal enterprises in the aggregate and that, as they say, is the ballgame.
And when that version of the law gets attacked, the defense is the same straightforward jingoism and propaganda that has successfully fended off attacks on the recent, more-egregious intrusions into our liberty.
If people can't see past some flag-waving to get fired up about the executive having the explicit authority to bug your internet connection, search your car, attach a GPS tracker or even unilaterally declare you no longer deserving of your constitutional rights and bundle you off to secret prison, they're not going to see past it to get fired up about what the government might do to their websites.