So Congress is holding another round of hearings on SOPA this week (the House Judiciary Committee's been at it since Thursday), and most of the coverage I've seen frames this as some kind of slugfest between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Big content versus big tech. MPAA versus Google. It's an easy story to tell, and it's mostly wrong, or at least incomplete.
Here's the thing nobody seems to be saying loud enough: if you run a website with any kind of user-submitted content, a comment section, a forum, a link aggregator, whatever, this bill is about you too. Not Google. You.
SOPA (H.R. 3261, look it up yourself if you don't believe me) and its Senate cousin PIPA (S.968) let a copyright holder go after a site's payment processors, ad networks, and even DNS providers if that site is accused of "facilitating" infringement. Accused. Not convicted, not even sued in a court that's heard your side of it first. A rightsholder sends a notice, and your Stripe or PayPal account can get cut off before a judge ever looks at the case. For a company the size of Google that's an annoyance. For some guy running a niche forum out of his apartment on a $15-a-month VPS, that's the whole business gone in an afternoon.
I keep thinking about this in terms of the sites I actually build for a living, small ones, client work, nothing glamorous. A restaurant review site with a comment section bolted on. A hobbyist forum for vintage synths. None of these are anywhere near "rogue foreign website" territory, but the bill's language on what counts as facilitating infringement is so loose that basically any user-generated content feature becomes a liability. One user pastes a torrent link in a comment thread and you don't catch it fast enough, and technically you're exposed. Good luck moderating that at 2am when you also have a day job.
It's not just comments either. Anyone doing embeds, anyone linking out, anyone running a search box that indexes content they don't control, congrats, you're in the blast radius now. jQuery Mobile just hit 1.0 last month and half the mobile redesigns I'm doing right now lean on exactly this kind of link-heavy, interactive content. The bill doesn't care that you're a two-person shop and not a media conglomerate with a legal department on retainer.
The DNS blocking piece is a separate mess and somehow worse from a pure engineering standpoint. A bunch of the actual infrastructure people, the folks who built DNSSEC, published a technical analysis earlier this year arguing that mandated DNS blocking breaks the trust model of the internet and just pushes everyone toward sketchy workarounds anyway. Nobody in that hearing room this week seems to have read it, or if they did, they didn't care much. A lot of the questions from committee members make it pretty obvious they don't fully understand how DNS resolution works, which, fine, most people don't, but maybe don't write binding technical mandates about it then.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, and a pile of others ran that full-page ad in the Times back in November calling the bills a threat to innovation and free expression online, and sure, that's true. But it's easy for them to say it from where they're sitting. They've got legal teams. They've got government relations people on staff. What they don't have, and don't need, is a scrappy little site that can't afford a lawyer the day a takedown notice shows up. That's the actual group that should be nervous here, and it's the one with the least lobbying muscle in the room by a wide margin.
Kind of reminds me of the Carrier IQ mess that's still blowing up everywhere, actually. Totally different issue, but the same basic shape: the people writing and enforcing rules like this usually aren't the ones who feel the consequences first. Carrier IQ ships quietly on a phone; nobody who actually bought the phone was in the room when that got decided either. Funny how that keeps happening.
Markup on SOPA is supposedly coming soon after this round of hearings wraps. If you run anything with a comment box on it, now's a decent time to actually read the bill text instead of just retweeting outrage about it secondhand.