SOPA, the internet censorship bill, is scheduled for a vote on January 24th in the Senate. (Read more about it here, here, and here.) Senators are under a lot of pressure from average Americans to vote down the bill, but according to Digital Trends, the chief sponsor of SOPA , Lamar Smith, says those protestations just don't matter:
When asked about the burgeoning opposition to the bill from online communities like Reddit.com, Smith added: âItâs a vocal minority. Because theyâre strident doesnât mean theyâre either legitimate or large in number. One, they need to read the language. Show me the language. Thereâs nothing they can point to that does what they say it does do. I think their fears are unfounded.â
There are so many things just factually wrong about Rep. Smithâs statement that itâs hard to know where to begin. So letâs just take his asinine dismissal from the top, shall we?
First, Rep. Smith says that ânot one of the criticsâ could point to specific language in the bill that would âin any way harm the Internet.â No? What about the 83 Internet pioneers â weâre talking people like Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP; Jim Gettys, editor of the HTTP/1.1 protocol standards; Leonard Kleinrock, a key developer of the ARPANET; in other words, the very people who built the Internet â who say that SOPA (and the Protect IP Act, PIPA), âwill risk fragmenting the Internetâs global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequencesâ because of the billsâ requirement that Internet service providers block domain names of infringing sites.
This is a bad, dumb law, poorly written and solely in service of gigantic entertainment corporations. We need to stop it.