Sen. Ron Wyden: PIPA/SOPA Is a Congressional Wake-Up Call

During an election, it may not always be clear which candidate voters will choose, but it is absolutely certain that those candidates need a lot of money just to get on the ballot. As a result, the U.S. government's course has been charted by lobbyists and their money for a very long time now, and that isn't likely to change unless the U.S. starts capping campaign contributions per donor like other nations do. (This is actually a very good idea!) So how important is public opinion really? Not very important at all, in the long run. Yes, PIPA/SOPA met heavy opposition, but will the same bill with a different name get the same response next year? How about the year after? What about a dozen different bills that incorporate all the bits and pieces of SOPA/PIPA separately? Paid lobbyists will always win in the long run.<p>Internet companies like google are being threatened with crushing government regulations just as Hollywood was in the 1920's. Hollywood's response was a combination of heavy lobbying and just barely enough self-regulation, in the form of the production code, to escape government regulation. The code was abandoned in the 60's, but Hollywood hasn't let up lobbying since. It's arguable that they have actually achieved a form of regulatory capture when it comes to copyright laws. e.g. The funny coincidence between how long copyrights last and the age of Mickey Mouse.<p>The real wake-up call that SOPA/PIPA has provided is not to the public, the government, or to the MPAA/RIAA. It's to companies that rely on the internet for their revenue. That revenue dwarfs Hollywood. Literally. Regardless of what the public wants or what lobbyists say, legislation like SOPA/PIPA would have a far larger negative impact on the U.S. economy than burning Hollywood to the ground. So why aren't there lobby groups sticking up for internet freedom? Why was PIPA/SOPA only stopped by a grass-roots movement? The money is there. Far more than the MPAA or RIAA could ever muster in fact.<p>My prediction is this: ISP's, google, etc. now know that Hollywood is gunning for them. They're going to fight back with their own lobbyists, and they have a <i>lot</i> more money. The next decade is going to be dark indeed for the MPAA/RIAA. They have awoken a juggernaut.

&#62; <i>While some have derided the events of last week as a departure from the way we do things in Washington</i><p>What? Who?<p>&#62; <i>If members of Congress better understood the digital world, they would know that downloading a digital good from a foreign site is no different than importing goods from a foreign country</i><p>WHAT? HOW?<p>Note: I realise this is supposed to be one of the good guys who gets it. This makes that second statement all the more worrying!

I'll tell you what should be a huge wake up call to most congressmen: When I was petitioning my 2 senators on PIPA, I found that their web form for constituents to submit letters were truly terrible. Each one required that I pick a category for my letter. Only one of my two senators even had "Technology" as a category that I could choose for submitting a letter.<p>One of my senators, Richard Blumenthal, had no category for Technology or the Internet. I had to file my letter under "Other." When a US senator doesn't even have an option for his constituents to talk to him about the Internet, you know they just don't understand technology. The Internet is probably by now the largest conduit through which money flows globally, outside of ForEx. These dinosaurs ignore it at their own peril.

Congressional job approval rating has been hovering around 10% for quite some time. Worse than Nixon during Watergate. The powerful incumbents responsible for the clusterfuck will remain in power. The swing seats will continue to be passed back and forth, perhaps a bit more quickly. That is the nature of our two-party republic.

C'mon, everyone understands "the central role that the Internet plays in their constituents’ lives", more or less. What they don't understand is how the Internet _works_. I doubt that before last week there weren't more than a dozen Congressmen who could explain DNS, never mind think through the implications of filtering. All of that was for the "experts", whom Congress turned to for "assurances" that everything would be okay. The media were scarcely better.<p>So they're no better than their experts, who are, hello, conflicted, or / and cherry-picked by conflicted players.<p>If we really want to get out of this lobbying complex, we might insist that our representatives demonstrate some actual knowledge before they legislate.

I certainly hope so. Thankfully, the cat is out of the bag on the US Government (and most government's, it seems) shutting down or controlling the internet.

Congress isn't like a business with a bad review. It's like a business with a bad review and they can censor the medium where the bad review appears.

And this shows further why Congress would want to restrict access by the people to the Internet. If they can get control in place that makes it like cable news where unpopular opinions are buried or shouted off the Net then they can pass SOPA, PIPA, NDAA, ACTA, or whatever the hell else they want without people having the Internet to inform them what is going on.

Congress wants tax revenue on websites hosted in foreign countries. The website hosting the site will be taxed on click through and the Web will have more "this site is not available in your country" messages. This is how net neutrality dies in the night. Taxing IP by import duties and surcharges. We built the most powerful tool on the planet, and governments everywhere are trying to claim sole ownership of it so they can tax it and control it until it is as politically acceptible as fox news. My freedom to visit sites anywhere in the world will be going away. I suppose it is inevitible, humans in power are extremely territorial and don't like to share like the enlightened individuals who built the internet do.<p>A globally free medium of data exchange limited only by bandwidth mostly unhindered by any powerful nation will be an enlightened blip on the timeline of the human race.