SOPA on the ropes?

No, not quite unfortunately. If you follow the tech headlines you may believe this is the case but the fight isn’t anywhere close to over yet.

Recently the House of Representatives released a list of supporters which are intertwined in this horrid legislation. On the list was GoDaddy, which to me is not that surprising. With the last year of Homeland Security website shut downs, GoDaddy was the registrar where all the seized domains were returned to for resale. Why wouldn’t they support this? They know they stand to gain if this passes with free domains. Well the internet rose up as one voice and organized by Reddit, a mass boycott of GoDaddy took place with huge internet names like Wikipedia moving services to other companies.

Seeming to take a cue from the PR disaster Netflix landed in, GoDaddy CEO stated in interviews that he neither supports or is against SOPA and ProtectIP. Way to fail at appealing to both sides of the debate and even with his stated indecision, a mass exodus of customers took place. Within 2 days the company lost 35,000 domains, this is only those that are publicly traceable (the ones GoDaddy hosts DNS for). While this number seems low if you consider how many domains they do provide for, it still translates to roughly $500k a year in revenue lost in just 2 days time. That also doesn’t include any other services they lost like SSL or self DNS hosted domains of which I’m sure only those within the company know the exacts on.

This mass exodus spooked the company so much they actually took steps to slow the exit of customers to other competitors by intentionally causing issues in the transfer process.

As many customers have recently complained of transfer issues, we suspect that this competitor is thwarting efforts to transfer domains away from them.

Specifically, GoDaddy appears to be returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap, delaying the transfer process. This practice is against ICANN rules.

http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-update/

Once again, making a bad situation worse as the net took that as a sign of guilt admittance and the exodus continued. Now this is an important and what I believe to be largely ignored effort on the part of the average people. It’s in my opinion a historical moment where the net took a stand against a company by voicing with their wallets and while or pockets may not be as deep as those in support of these bills, together we can show enough of an impact on businesses where they are forced to listen if they want to keep taking our money. Sadly we shouldn’t have to resort to this since our politicians should be doing what we as a people want and what’s best for us and not for what’s in the interest of businesses, but alas, those days dotted a long time ago and all our politicians were bought and paid for long before they were elected.

GoDaddy and a Censorship History…

Now personally, I hate GoDaddy. I just don’t like the sexist marketing campaign where they have sexual innuendos in their commercials for a company that is basically just a Registrar. That reason pales in comparison to my others though, which is their business practices. GoDaddy likes to consider itself the Internet Police when it comes to domains they manage and sites they host. They are quick to censor things and favor the big business customers over the small guy or gal with a website. The best example can be seen here:

http://news.cnet.com/GoDaddy-pulls-security-site-after-MySpace-complaints/2100-1025_3-6153607.html

Basically the sum of that is MySpace called GoDaddy to complain that a website that dealt with security and exploits, for layman purposes a hacker website but a completely legitimate one, was hosting lists of usernames and passwords on an archived mailing list posting of MySpace users. MySpace called GoDaddy to complain, not the site owners, and requested it be taken down, and GoDaddy complied, again, without speaking to the site owners first.

While the content of a mailing list is difficult neigh impossible to regulate most times, this is the sort of thing that GoDaddy is known for doing. They have done similar things over the years and without proper cause or legal rationale and so it comes as no surprise they helped to create SOPA.

Now recent headlines state that big name companies in the video game industry are withdrawing support for the bill and this is not entirely true. The individual companies themselves are yes but only in a spin of words and PR campaign in an effort to avoid a Go Daddy like scenario. Nintendo, Sony, and Electronic Arts have withdrawn support from the bill publicly, but they belong to the Entertainment Software Association, a unified group of game development companies which still supports the legislation. So yes, they withdrew themselves to satisfy the less informed customers, but they now quietly support it through that other entity. Think of it like a Swiss bank account, they can funnel money to support the bills through that organization and still maintain a “clean” image to their customers. Unfortunately not many tech writers theses days seem to be paying attention to that little loophole and are doing exactly what theses companies are hoping, spreading word that they withdrew support to quell any customer uprising that could impact sales. I could say i was disappointed in how the media is not being accurate in it’s reporting, but I lost faith in news media a long long time ago so it comes as no surprise sadly.

Now the internet is mainly abuzz with SOPA but ProtectIP is it’s brother making it’s way through Congress and is just as bad but hasn’t earned as much attention. Again, I blame the media and it’s lack of reputable journalism for not making it as known as SOPA. Granted ProtectIP isn’t as bad, but it is still bad for the internet in the long term.

Now for those of you who still don’t understand why these are bad pieces of legislation, I’ll try and break it down some simply. Basically these two bills want to change the freedoms we all take for granted on the internet. Things like posting YouTube videos on your Facebook or G+ pages, linking to websites in emails, Web pages and public forums, even so much as quoting articles or movies would all come under censorship. Service providers would be held responsible for content deemed infringement and could be shut down without any warning or court order.

What is so dangerous about the wording of theses bills is they are very very generalized and vague in what can be considered “infringing content”. Plus, the methods proposed in shutting these accused sites give way to freedom of speech issues. Essentially the U.S. wants to make the internet work like it does in China and other oppressive countries where they control what you see and do and filter out accused sites. See where the problem comes into play now? You pool that in with the complete lack of any oversight on the entities which would be responsible for enforcement of this and it paints a very grim future of the internet. Orson Welles 1984 anyone? Think about it, what would stop sites which offered information or news on political issues or corporate scandals from being shut down for “copyright infringement”? Do you really want top entrust the government to be honest and accurate with it’s removal of sites and filtering of content. The Homeland Security office has already shown how inept it is with handling the shutdowns of sites in the last year and a vast majority of them being unfounded and incorrect. Thankfully there is a legal recourse right now to combat those false shutdowns and with these bills, that recourse would go away. We don’t need to be taking lessons from China and other oppressive regimes on how to police the internet.

Take a look at Belarus, the land of soviet era oppression and dictatorship. they recently passed a law that fines and can even imprison anyone caught browsing sites outside the country. If places such as Internet Cafe’s don’t report such behavior, they too can be found guilty and the same punishments levied.

The Law requires that all companies and individuals who are registered as entrepreneurs in Belarus use only domestic Internet domains for providing online services, conducting sales, or exchanging email messages. It appears that business requests from Belarus cannot be served over the Internet if the service provider is using online services located outside of the country. The tax authorities, together with the police and secret police, are authorized to initiate, investigate, and prosecute such violations.

Additionally, the Law states that the owners and administrators of Internet cafés or other places that offer access to the Internet might be found guilty of violating this Law and fined and their businesses might be closed if users of Internet services provided by these places are found visiting websites located outside of Belarus and if such behavior of the clients was not properly identified, recorded, and reported to the authorities. The Law states that this provision may apply to private individuals if they allow other persons to use their home computers for browsing the Internet.

http://www.loc.gov/lawweb/servlet/lloc_news?disp3_l205402929_text

Sounds insane right? Well SOPA and ProtectIP aren’t all that far off from such a thing. It’s a step in a bad direction headed down the road of oppression and the concept, design and spirit of the Internet is all about freedom of information. It also opens the door to abuse and infringing on freedoms we in this country cherish so much. While we don’t have to pirate movies, music and whatnot, using an iron rule to try and curb those things isn’t going to solve the issue either.

In the end this comes down to the entertainment industry once again trying to kill off a threat to how it makes money in any way it can. Instead of taking time and effort to try and grow with technology and adapt how they make money to how technology moves and the internet moves ahead, they would rather stifle it. The same thing was done with VCR’s, DVD’s, Cassette Tapes, etc. Its easier for them to sit back and watch the money roll in than it is to innovate and keep pace with the changing times.

Think about how a censored internet would look and be like. Wikipedia with incomplete articles because parts were deemed to infringe upon copyrights, making a funny YouTube video for your friends without any background music because its copyrighted, or Facebook and Google+ profiles where you couldn’t even express your like/dislike of things because it might be forcefully removed if the post its about is considered copyrighted info. Now think of the potential for abuse that could and highly likely would take place with no legal oversight in the removal of those sites and content. A blog writes a review of a movie it thinks is bad and the movie company forces the posts removal because the mention of the title is considered “infringing”. A site that points out information on a government bill that jeopardizes citizen liberty in some way suddenly is taken down or blocked access to because it “infringes copyrights”. If you think these things are far fetched they aren’t.

Now don’t misunderstand me here, I believe that copyrights should be upheld and defended as if you make something you should have the right to call it your own. I am also NOT advocating we all have the right to pilfer and pirate movies, games, software or whatever at free will. The thing is though, no matter what steps are taken, this will always take place. When you make something good and it costs money to obtain, there will always be a group of people who refuse to pay and try to find ways to obtain it for free. It’s called theft and theft is a part of society unfortunately, such is life. The problem here is that the proposed “solution” doesn’t fix the problem in any way, it simply punishes the rest of the people by censoring what they can see and have access too. That’s not how you fix a problem, that’s how you ruin a society and create a bigger problem or make a problem worse than it is, which is what I think would happen if this went into effect.

Something to remember here that I think is important:

“With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably. …. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged.”

That quote comes from a TV show dialogue. With SOPA, I’d be forced to take that down…

In the end, this is what happens when people in power are allowed to make decisions about things they know nothing about. While this wouldn’t be so bad if they listened to the experts who do know, they aren’t. In every testimony from an expert stating this is a bad idea, congressmen and representatives in support of this bill simply dismissed the facts given and in some cases outright ignored them or lied that they never got any response.

“I am pleased that the unfounded claims of critics of the Stop Online Piracy Act have overwhelmingly been rejected by a majority of House Judiciary Committee members. The criticism of this bill is completely hypothetical; none of it is based in reality. Not one of the critics was able to point to any language in the bill that would in any way harm the Internet. Their accusations are simply not supported by any facts.”

- Lamar Smith (R-Texas)

If these bills do end up passing, you might want to know how much your freedom costs: $57.4 million, less than the cost of what one decent movie takes in from ticket sales on a summer weekend.

http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/112-hr-3261/1019110/total-contributions

* Note: I wrote this on my tablet on the train yesterday, so please forgive any typos