SOPA: Bad for the Internet, Bad for America
January 16th, 2012 | By: Don Becker
In December, while much of the U.S. was up in arms over extending payroll tax cuts and the detention provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) was hoping his own pet project could be snuck through committee: HR 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In very broad language, in its current form SOPA requires Internet service providers to block access to websites that engage in activities related to content piracy, including removing such sites from their DNS servers (that’s what turns www.unwinnable.com into the IP address needed to connect to us), with the intention of making them, for all intents and purposes, disappear off the Internet entirely. (more…)





