Internet Blacklisting; yes or no?

Censorship?

Not Mao any more surely, but I agree with your basic premise. I am against censoring Americans’ access to the web.

The idea that this is even being considered as legislation is dumb. If it isn’t blatant censorship I don’t know what it is. The internet is the greatest thing to happen to media (and probably culture) ever. “Certain websites” starts as banning porn to banning people talking about porn to banning anything that alludes to a body part. (Very dramatic, I know.)

That this is seriously being proposed is either the result of two things, as I see it: Our legislators have lost touch with the first amendment, or there are enough crazy people in this country to push legislation.

Not Mao, but if this bill is what you say it is (I haven’t read up on it), I find it highly unlikely that it will pass.

It’s hard to vote in censorship; most of the countries that have censorship laws also have or had a government that holds/held an inordinate amount of power. It will be very hard to push through.

Against it.

I’m all for intellectual property rights (and somewhat hypocritically, I have nothing against music and data piracy), but this is dumb and I’m not in support of it.

Hey—content providers paid good money for their congressmen!

This bill, combined with the already existing DMCA laws is too much.

All this bill will do is give big record labels and tv producers the power to destroy the internet, this is the first attack on net neutrality. you cant have a bill that lets you take down websites, specially not when it will be as easy to enforce as the DMCA laws. i.e. a couple clicks of a button.

you may ask why i would care seeing as i dont even live in america, and this is an american law. well, the DMCA is an american law, but they dont seem to have much of a problem applying it to the rest of the world. you just report to google and they wont even show up your site anymore in searches.

if this bill passes, all it is going to do is hurt america’s economy. how? well everyone will start to hire servers in other countries. host everything outside of the US to bypass the law. sure, the law will probably still chase them, but at least they would have some kind of defense in court.

I urge anyone else against this bill to go to demandprogress.org and sign the petition against it.

Ha, wow, this really is absurd… The question is, where does it stop? Who’s to judge what’s suitable and what’s not? Suitability, after all, is subjective; not something that should be decided for you. If you go on a bad site, it’s your own responsibility. If you go on a good site that has been blacklisted… well, that’s where the problems with personal rights and opinions come in. One must also consider, despite how Orwellian it sounds, that the government could easily abuse this and blacklist anything that posed a threat to them… not saying that they would, of course, and the drama would be ridiculous, but it’s worth thinking about.

Still, be thankful it’s not internet whitelisting…

Against it.

On what basis are they proposing banning the websites? National security? Pornography? Gambling? Any way you look at it, I think it’s probably a bad idea, but I wouldn’t mind seeing more details.

The internet provides an anonymous service wherein people can express their perspectives on any given matter. That alone leads me to believe that it will only be to the detriment of civilisation to restrict such a service. With this said, reviewing and evaluating the facts associated with this bill is a necessity before reaching any firm conclusion.

@Dr_Dredd Here’s a quote off the COICA Fact Sheet:

”What kind of domains can go on the list?

The list is for domains “dedicated to infringing activity,” which is defined very broadly — any site where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are “central to the activity of the Internet site” would be blocked.

What’s so bad about that?

Well, it means sites like YouTube could get censored in the US. Copyright holders like Viacom argue that copyrighted material is central to activity of YouTube. But under current US law, YouTube is perfectly legal as long as they take down copyrighted material when they’re informed about it—which is why Viacom lost their case in court. If this bill passes, Viacom doesn’t even need to prove YouTube is doing anything illegal—as long as they can persuade a court that enough other people are using it for copyright infringement, that’s enough to get the whole site censored.

And even without a court order, sites can get blacklisted just by order of the Attorney General—and the bill encourages ISPs to block those sites as well. ISPs have plenty of reason to obey a government blacklist even when they’re not legally required.”

Does that answer your question?

@Foolaholic Yeah. Certainly, it looks problematic. Guilt by association and all that.

It sets a dangerous precedent. Does your blog say unflattering things about the administration? Wham! No more blog!