SOPA and PIPA / Wikipedia Blackouts

[Aggie]

I'm just catching wind of this now, so not much to comment on it, but figured it merited a thread.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_blackout

To: English Wikipedia Readers and Community
From: Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director
Date: January 16, 2012

Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate — that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOPA#Websites_that_host_user_content

Websites that host user content

Opponents have warned that SOPA would have a negative impact on online communities. Journalist Rebecca MacKinnon argued in an op-ed that making companies liable for users' actions could have a chilling effect on user-generated sites such as YouTube. "The intention is not the same as China's Great Firewall, a nationwide system of Web censorship, but the practical effect could be similar", she says.[28] The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) warned that websites Etsy, Flickr and Vimeo all seemed likely to shut down if the bill becomes law.[29] Policy analysts for New America Foundation say this legislation would enable law enforcement to take down an entire domain due to something posted on a single blog, arguing, "an entire largely innocent online community could be punished for the actions of a tiny minority."[30]

Additional concerns include the impact on common Internet functions such as linking or access data from the cloud. EFF claimed the bill would ban linking to sites deemed offending, even in search results[31] and on services such as Twitter.[32] Christian Dawson, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Virginia-based hosting company ServInt, predicted that the legislation would lead to many cloud computing and Web hosting services moving out of the US to avoid lawsuits.[33] The Electronic Frontier Foundation have stated that the requirement that any site must self-police user generated content would impose significant liability costs and explains "why venture capitalists have said en masse they won't invest in online startups if PIPA and SOPA pass."

So the assault on the free internet begins....

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

It started long time ago, and will continue until there is a way to balance fair use, piracy, public benefit and corporate IP. In our current corporatist/corporatocracy environment, IP companies will have an edge, but piracy has proven extremely hard to avoid, restricting information is anathema to a free society and there will always be ways to circumvent locks, which will make the efforts costly and pointless.

[Opsa]

Scary. So, what can we do about it?

[Aggie]

It started long time ago, and will continue until there is a way to balance fair use, piracy, public benefit and corporate IP. In our current corporatist/corporatocracy environment, IP companies will have an edge, but piracy has proven extremely hard to avoid, restricting information is anathema to a free society and there will always be ways to circumvent locks, which will make the efforts costly and pointless.

With the current mindset of many tech-savvy internet users, there will be ways around things.  But...  and this is a significant but in my mind...  what percentage of internet users does this actually represent?  What percentage of current internet users will be just as happy to go along with any changes, provided they still get access to their Facebook, some version of permitted-result search engine, and funny pictures of animals.  I think usage patterns in other forms of media set a strong precedent that the great masses will just go along with whatever is easy and permissible, and that while other options will be out there to circumvent the system, they won't be a major competitor.

Realistically, if you had the choice a  corporately-controlled 90% version of the internet that required you to be continually ID'd and tracked to use, or could use illegal software to pseudonymously access 100% of it, which would you choose?

How would this answer change according to the likelihood of prosecution for using such software?  At what chance of being caught would your answer change?  A 1% chance? A 10% chance? 50%?  If your Internet Service Provider was forced to be the gatekeeper that was in charge of monitoring (i.e. if a law was crafted to hold ISPs liable for the infringements of their customers), how far would you be willing to go to circumvent their system? I have seen little indication that suggests ISPs or content-management / access companies will do anything except bow to the wishes of the law in the countries they operate from (think of Google's self-censorship in China). On the contrary, these companies have the potential for great power and profit gains if they can take over from non-compliant rivals.


On a related note, what's the viability of creating a parallel and free publicnet if the current internet goes private?

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

On a related note, what's the viability of creating a parallel and free publicnet if the current internet goes private?

Pretty good, I'd say.

The current internet's flexible and multi-routed pathways essentially grew in an organic way, and not by direct design by anyone.

[Aggie]

Would we have to go back to dialing each other directly? I assume not, but at what point would such an effort be stymied by They That Own The Pipes?

In other words, if the commercial interests that profit from the internet monopolize the infrastructure, how could a public alternet be created at all? I see the ISPs being the choke-point here, and likely the point at which regulatory pressure would be applied. I don't see a way of circumventing that with any currently available technology. The corporate entities that stand to profit from a completely commercialized internet will quite frankly have the power and money to monopolize the infrastructure / service providers, if it comes to that.

I'm sure one could schlep some covert signals around somehow, but I would presume that most of such traffic would be specifically for illegal activity, and thus prone to crackdown or at least extreme scrutiny. The end result is still the loss of an open, non-commercialized public space in any meaningful sense of the word. Free speech isn't very free if you have to meet in basements to do it.

[Griffin NoName]

What gets me is that the case is in the US, yet the whole world would be affected. I don't see why, eg. people in the UK should be affected by US legislation.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

What gets me is that the case is in the US, yet the whole world would be affected. I don't see why, eg. people in the UK should be affected by US legislation.

Ask the egomaniacs behind any of the recent Rethulican laws...

<meh>