So Congress is about to spend a chunk of December arguing about whether to break the internet, and I figured I should actually read the bill instead of just retweeting angry links about it like everyone else on my Twitter feed.
The bill is called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the House Judiciary Committee had its first real hearing on it back on November 16th. There's a markup session scheduled for December 15th where they'll actually start voting on amendments, so this is the point where it stops being a theoretical thing law professors argue about and starts being a thing that could actually pass.
Here's the short version of what it does, as best I can tell after reading way more of the actual text than any reasonable person should on a Tuesday night. If a copyright holder decides a website is "dedicated to infringement," they can go after not just the site but everyone connected to it. Payment processors like PayPal would have to cut them off. Ad networks would have to stop serving ads to them. And this is the part that got the engineers really worried, internet service providers could be required to block the site at the DNS level, meaning it wouldn't even resolve when you typed the address into your browser.
That last bit is why you're seeing actual technical people, not just the usual EFF crowd, freaking out about this. A pile of the guys who literally built the DNS system, guys like Paul Vixie and folks who worked on DNSSEC, wrote a joint paper back in the spring saying this stuff breaks core parts of how the internet works and opens up new security holes at the same time it's failing to actually stop piracy. That's a rough combination. You're degrading the plumbing and it doesn't even fix the thing it's supposedly fixing, because anyone who wants to get to a blocked site can just type in the IP address or use a different DNS provider in about four seconds.
The hearing on the 16th was also kind of a mess in a way that got a lot of attention. It was five hours of witnesses, and by most accounts it was five copyright-industry lawyers and one guy from Google, with the actual engineers who understand how DNS works barely represented at the table. A few members of the committee admitted flat out that they don't really understand the technology they're regulating, which, I mean, sure, fine, that's Congress for you, but it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence when the bill could functionally break how people find websites.
The tech industry response has been loud. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, eBay, Zynga, Mozilla and a bunch of others signed onto a full-page ad in the New York Times that ran the same day as the hearing, warning that the bill as written would "expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities." Which is corporate-speak, but the underlying point is real: if you run a site with any user-generated content, a comment section, a forum, whatever, you're now on the hook in a much bigger way if someone posts something infringing and you're slow to deal with it.
On the other side you've got the MPAA and RIAA and a long list of content industry folks who are, understandably, sick of watching people run entire businesses off of pirated movies and pretending it's fine because the site itself is hosted somewhere overseas. That's a real problem too. I'm not going to pretend piracy sites are some kind of victimless hobby, because plenty of them are genuinely shady operations making real money off other people's work.
But breaking DNS to fix a legal problem feels like using a sledgehammer because you can't find the right screwdriver. Also can we talk about how the committee kept calling it "the DNS" like it's one specific server somewhere, that drove me up the wall watching the clips.
Markup starts on the 15th. I'll believe it stalls out when I see it stall out, because bills like this have a way of coming back even after people think they've killed them.