Thank goodness for objective analysis.

Off the bat, that the AG and/or copyright holders would need a court order to get a site to remove links to other sites guilty of copyright infringement kinda blows up the whole "no judicial review" argument. I am not a lawyer either, but believe court orders must be issued by a court.


I am really not seeing the problem here, apart from the "measurable burden" (I would be curious to know what metric they use) that is probably about equal to the burden of making sure no one links to kiddie porn. Beyond that the critical issue is free and open discussion of ANYTHING. That is not even a good ideal, but it has never existed on the internet anyway, so the point is moot. Setting aside things like how fast I would be sitebanned for linking to porn, it has only been a few months since the US blew up a guy in his car for using the internet to teach people to make and plant bombs, as well as to recruit and indoctrinate terrorists. FBI agents routinely pose as minors online to entrap chatroom pedophiles. It is ALREADY not possible to discuss anything and everything online, and insisting it should be ignores both that reality and the compelling reasons for it; it is NOT a winning argument.


Yeah, see, that is kinda the problem, and why Congress is considering legislation to impose criminal penalties (i.e. prison terms) on people who flip civil laws the bird and casually circumvent existing internet barriers to piracy. As to "the internet in the US will have entered the realm of federal regulation and censorship"... wow, and people say I am uninformed on the issue. Again, the US has been regulating internet content in the US literally since the internet was created by the Defense Department four decades ago, so I do not see what is so earth shatteringly shocking about that. But, yes, the US government is going to regulate the internet; that inevitability is what these bills are about. NOTHING on Earth will prevent that regulation, because it is increasingly needed; the responsible and constructive approach for netizens is to get out in front of that legislation and assume the role in designing it to which they (rightly) feel entitled. That is pretty much what the various industry interests are doing, and demanding NO new legislation be passed is a naïve and unrealistic approach that merely cedes those interests sole control over what the inevitable new law will dictate.


THAT is the kind of constructive feedback Obama requested, and anyone who wants that is better served by copying and pasting it into an email to the White House and their Representative and Senators than by all caps rants insisting NO legislation be enacted. Because guess which approach will be dismissed out of hand?