Stop… Being Self-aggrandizing

The Internet is a wonderful thing. You can go there to find anything, especially if you’re mostly looking for your own opinion.  That’s especially true today where you’ll find a variety of big sites blacking out, blocking their own access, or otherwise whining about the Stop Online Piracy Act.

The act itself is a dumb piece of legislation, designed to enable random people in power at any point to deny service or access to specific IP addresses (and this is a very simple explanation), the act is reasonably unenforcable at its highest level, and I would think easily circumvented by any sophisticated pirate.  I’m a bit limited in being able to talk about it because I’m currently involved in technology that would be directly affected (both in requirement and revenue) by the act (sorry, L, I’m still looking to see what I can say eventually).

Anyway, the bill appears nearly dead in Congress, and the administration appears to be blowing with the political winds and threatening to shut it down if it hits the president’s desk anyway.  So now we’re down to a bunch of geeks who can’t figure out how to put the dander back down in time, so they’re continuing to make a deal out of it.

Let’s face it… it’s highly unlikely that Google would ever get blocked due to SOPA in anything other than a totalitarian society.  For an example, go check China.  However, Google appears to be continuing to make money there, and they’ll happily pander in order to keep that business growing.  Wikipedia is also unlikely to ever suffer from an act like this.  However, they feel obliged to speak “for the little people” in a way that makes them feel better.  So on one hand this is “Occupy” for the Internet crowd.  They couldn’t hang in the tents since the generators wouldn’t run the temporary datacenter.

Make no mistake that the legislation is a lousy idea, and that it could be used for censorship faster than it could for actually, you know, stopping online piracy.  But street theater on the Internet doesn’t amuse me enough to participate.

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