Congress's Techno-Ignorance No Longer Funny 477
pigrabbitbear writes "Since its introduction, the Stop Online Piracy Act (and its Senate twin PROTECT-IP) has been staunchly condemned by countless engineers, technologists and lawyers intimately familiar with the inner functioning of the internet. Completely beside the fact that these bills, as they currently stand, would stifle free speech and potentially cripple legitimate businesses by giving corporations extrajudicial censorial powers, there's an even more insidious threat: the method of DNS filtering proposed to block supposed infringing sites opens up enormous security holes that threaten the stability of the internet itself. The problem: key members of the House Judiciary Committee still don't understand how the internet works, and worse yet, it's not clear whether they even want to."
Re:Fuck them (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Confusing positions (Score:5, Informative)
They're perfectly consistent positions. The position is:
"Don't allow people to fuck with the internet"
Re:Confusing positions (Score:5, Informative)
Net Neutrality isn't the government regulating internet traffic. Net Neutrality is the government forbidding corporations from doing so.
Re:Confusing positions (Score:4, Informative)
No, that's not Net Neutrality at all. Net Neutrality is a whole bunch of rules that boils down to "Don't mess with internet traffic"
Re:Confusing positions (Score:5, Informative)
Can't tell if you're trolling or just dim.
It's very simple. Net neutrality isn't regulating the Internet, it's regulating providers. Furthermore, it doesn't change what's on the internet, just how it gets to you. Fiddling with the DNS servers is 100% different. The analogy (not even an analogy...) is requiring the telephone company to let you call their competitors without an additional charge, vs blocking you from saying particular things.
The only thing the two have in common is the word 'internet'. Even a cursory glance shows that "don't throttle for profit" and "turn off this site" are completely different.
Re:Confusing positions (Score:4, Informative)
Nevertheless, it's perfectly consistent to be pro-net-neutrality and anti-SOPA. The underlying principle here is to maintain equal access to communication technology, in particular to not allow consolidate power bases (in particular, corporations) to control the flow of information. The purpose of net neutrality is to force companies to not discriminate between information seekers and providers; this maximizes the amount of information everyone can easily access. The purpose of striking down SOPA is to prevent companies from having yet more legal power to issue takedowns, censor material, and discriminate between information seekers and provides; preventing SOPA from being passed also maximizes the amount of information everyone can easily access.
Your strawman was implicitly painting this as a debate about whether regulation is good or bad. But that's incorrect. The question is not whether we should have laws. The question is what laws.
Re:Splainittothem (Score:3, Informative)
Stupid.
I don't know why I'm typing this since it's been typed countless times before: He never said he invented the Internet.
If there were more politicians with Al Gore's level of understanding stuff we would't have all these problems.
Re:They don't want to (Score:4, Informative)
Re:They don't want to (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That's because (Score:5, Informative)
I voted for Zoe Lofgren, and she vigorously opposes this travesty.
Here's a statement she made today, on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/nfhhy/member_of_house_judiciary_committee_ama_on_sopa/ [reddit.com]
(Yes, she has a Reddit account.)
Re:They don't want to (Score:5, Informative)
Do you have any idea how many different subjects Congress has to deal with? Do you really expect the members of Congress, elected from the general public, to be experts in all of those areas? If YOU were elected to Congress, how many areas are YOU an expert in?
I can't speak for Congress, but I was an elected member of a city council in my lifetime.
I can honestly say that my real area of expertise is computers...everywhere else, I was decidedly weak in knowledge, at least compared to experts.
So when a bylaw crossed our desk that I didn't fully understand...I did my FUCKING JOB and worked my fucking balls off doing research to make goddamn sure I understood what the bylaw was proposing, and why I should vote for it (or, conversely, vote against it).
Seriously, it is their fucking JOB to figure out enough to know whether or not a law should be voted for or against, not what some asshole with a suitcase of money tells them to do. You don't have to be an expert to learn enough about a topic to make a sound decision.
Re:They don't want to (Score:4, Informative)
The corporations would always lobby against something like that because (as the lobbyists would say) "the private sector was more informed and better at making such decisions that law-makers" and "it was far better to allow market forces to prevail" than to allow "marxist style central planning dictate economic direction".
Reality, they didn't want anyone who really knew the limitations of the technology to become involved in the scrutiny of public sector contracts. As is typical in the UK, such public sector contracts usually include NDA agreements to "guarantee the public gets value for money".
Re:They don't want to (Score:5, Informative)
Thing is, though, it is the 0.1% who get to play. Just the way the system works.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2011/11/20/the-top-0-1-of-the-nation-earn-half-of-all-capital-gains/ [forbes.com]
It's a nice idea that everyone gets to play, but like it or not, this tool has been pretty much completely conscripted by not the top 1%, but by the top 0.1%.
Re:They don't want to (Score:5, Informative)
A corporation is also a means of dodging responsibility for one's actions. Because the leaders of a corporation can't be held responsible for what the company does except in certain extreme situations, corporate speech does not have the same liability/risk that individual speech does. This is why it must be regulated in ways that individual speech is not. No freedom without responsibility and all that.
And the reality is that even if you get together with a million other geeks, you will not be able to do much in terms of lobbying. Congresspeople don't give a rat's ass about any group of people, including corporations, unless that group is creating lots of jobs in their district. What this means is that no political organization has any real bearing on anything in politics beyond perhaps a little lip service from the politicians as they try to make it appear that they still represent the people as a whole. Maybe, maybe you might be able to sway an election to the other candidate. The problem is that the other candidate doesn't give a rat's ass about your opinion, either, which means the best you can really do is nudge the ball a few feet to either side of the fifty yard line.
In short, corporations are so much unlike the general public that any attempt at comparison is meaningless.
Re:They don't want to (Score:5, Informative)
If rights can be blindly transferred from individuals to a collective, then the reverse should also true. The corporate veil should vanish and all members of the collective should be jointly and severally liable for any harm the collective causes.
The rights of a limited liability entity should be limited too.
They used to be much more limited. As late as the 1870s and 1880s, various states had laws on the books that amounted to a "corporate death penalty"--that is, companies that repeatedly broke the law or existed only for the purpose of breaking the law, could have their corporate charters' revoked and their assets seized to pay off any existing debts.
This is had the effect making corporate managers think long and hard about straddling the line between "lawful" and "unlawful." These laws were mostly gutted during the Gilded Age (or, perhaps, I need to start referring to the First Gilded Age since we seem to be in the early stages of a second one,) by robber-barons who wanted as few barriers as possible between their wealth and unlimited power. ...Sound familiar?
Re:They don't want to (Score:4, Informative)
Based on some probably out of date numbers, in order to own a 1/300,000,000 stake in the market capitalization of the publicly traded stock in the US you'd need to invest $50,000. Now that's entirely possible for one person to do and have obviously. I know people who probably have 20 times that in the market right now. I'm somewhere around half myself. But I wouldn't say that it's easy for the most of the population to achieve that in the short term. And this isn't even counting market cap that isn't publicly traded, but is instead held privately.
Not all of them (Score:4, Informative)
On the one side you had a few (very few) congressmen/women, namely Mr. Issa, Mr. Polis, Mr. Chaffetz, Ms. Lofgren and Ms. Jackson. They spent the entire hearing pleading with the chairman and the rest of the committee to allow experts (nerds as they often said) to essentially come in and explain the internet to them, because it was obvious that 99% of the members of the committee had no idea what they were talking about. They made reasonable, logical arguments and put forth one amendment after the other trying to clarify some really vague areas of the bill, all of which were shot down by the rest of the committee usually by a vote of ~6 to 24.
On the other side you had 5 or 6 members of the committee who also admitted several times that they had zero understanding of the technical aspects of the bill, but that the bill was awesome anyway. This group was mainly the chairman of the committee Mr. Smith, Mr. Berman, Mr. Watt, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Goodlatte and Ms. Waters. They made no arguments beyond "We have to do something. This is something. Therefor we should do this". Unlike the first group they didn't care that they were ignorant on the subject, they just wanted to get the damn thing passed. I doubt anyone here would be surprised to learn they all [opensecrets.org] received [opensecrets.org] large [opensecrets.org] campaign [opensecrets.org] contributions [opensecrets.org] from the TV/Music/Film industry. Check the contributions of the first group and you'll find the same industry conspicuously absent. It's also worth noting that more than half the committee never said a word during the entire session that wasn't "No" in response to an amendment vote. This third group cared so little they couldn't even be bothered to take part in the debate.
So when you're condemning this committee for being willfully ignorant just keep in mind that 5 or 6 of them don't deserve to be thrown in with the rest like that. I'll end with a quote from a frustrated Darrell Issa, speaking to the chairman of the committee half way through the second day: