Congress seeks to tame the Internet

[PETRUS]

Ever since the days of Napster, the recording industry and movie industry have treated the Internet as a place on the map marked “Here be dragons.” For the last decade, Hollywood and big music have spent time not innovating, but trying to get the U.S. Congress to help them tame the Internet. Over the years, they’ve floated a variety of legislative mechanisms to do that. The latest is a House bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as it is known, has Internet advocates boiling — and with good reason.

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And because the U.S. is doing it, there’s even more at stake. We might like to think of the Internet as an organic global medium, but someone has to make the trains run on time. That someone is ICANN, a California-based group that runs the Internet’s naming and numbering systems under a contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce. Not everyone in the world is pleased with the central role of the United States in the Internet’s governance, with several nations and groups wanting ICANN to hand over its authority to the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union. The U.S. government — and the countless computer scientists, engineers, and Internet policy advocates who live and work here — have been good stewards of the Internet so far. SOPA would throw that away with, potentially, little in return.

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/20/congress_seeks_to_tame_the_internet/singleton

More at the link.

[opihimoimoi]

1. How is this meddling working to fix something not broken? WTF?

We should be careful of unintended consequences