The Internet is Broken – Long Live the Internet

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The past month has seen the Internet (all of it), along with the engineers and CEO’s that made it useable rally against two proposed bills in the United States House of Representatives, and Senate. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT IP (here by shortened to PIP)) aim to solve the “proliferation of online piracy” by fundamentally changing the way the Internet works.

Why are ‘Nerds’ and engineers against SOPA and PIP? The following is not a list of reasons why we are against these acts.

  • We are pirates and never want to pay for anything. Arrrr!
  • We are barefoot, longhaired hippies and never want to pay for anything.
  • We are communists never want to pay for anything.
  • We hate “the establishment” never want to pay for anything.
  • (Starting to see a theme, here?)

Here is why I am against these acts

  • These bills are written by people who have, at best, a Wikipedian summary knowledge of the technologies they are talking about.
  • The proposed actions stand to fundamentally break the way humans interact with the Internet.
  • Enforcement of these acts will cost millions of taxpayer dollars. PIP is said to cost upwards of $40,000,000 (40 Million) over 4 years.
  • Laws like these establish precedent that can become the basis for other, scarier overarching laws.
  • The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), along with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the RIAA and MPAA have continued to show their ineptitude with respect to Fair Use and rights afforded to copyright holders under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), as aptly demonstrated with the whole dajaz1 debacle from earlier this month. Not to mention the ongoing Universal Media Group’s (UMG) tiff with Megaupload and Youtube.
  • In a Legis Memo written by Harvard Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe, the professor argues that policies put forth by SOPA may violate the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution.
  • The MPAA and the RIAA have yet to prove that piracy is hurting their business. Sure, it can be argued that there is no accurate way to show numbers, but is anyone not able to put food on the table because of piracy? If not, how is Congress going to justify $10,000,000/year to stop piracy to the taxpayers?
  • Even the proponents of the bills know they are shoveling BS and calling it gold. House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Berman of California asked his colleagues to “pay attention to our intentions, not what we actually wrote in the bill.” The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Laws are not, and should not be based on intent. Laws should not be purposely ambiguous. Laws should be clear in intent, language, and purpose.
  • DNS based filtering is easily subverted by using international DNS servers, proxies, or by intrinsically knowing that 74.125.113.147 is Google.com. In fact, there is already a Firefox Plug-in, DeSopa, which actively bypasses the proposed DNS poisoning proposed by SOPA and PIP. Existing proxy tunneling technologies like Tor will also bypass DNS poisoning.

The fundamental problem with SOPA is that they are using technology to solve an economic issue. SOPA and PIP aim to block access to top-level domains (TLD) hosted outside of the United States. These proposed laws state that current US laws don’t provide a reliable medium to takedown suspected infringing content from servers hosted outside of the US. No one is disputing that. What we are disputing is the proposed means to solve this issue. Instead of finding a way to remove that content, SOPA and PIP aim to block US Internet users from accessing those sites.

The best analogy for DNS is the Yellow Pages. Given a person or business’s name, the Yellow Pages tell you their street address. So, as an example, business ‘XYZ’ maps to 525 East 35th street. SOPA and PIP want to actively poison the records so that consumers will no longer be able to find the street address of business ‘XYZ’ if they are suspected of copyright infringement.

What is worse is that many websites are hosted within the same domain. Community forums, or free websites like the now defunct geocities and anglefire are all part of the same domain. In our example, xyz.geocities.com abc.geocities.com all share the same address of 525 East 35th street. When SOPA or PIP poison the DNS record when XYZ is suspected of infringing on copy protected material, ABC also becomes inaccessible, along with all other sites on that domain. It is equivalent of saying that because your neighbor might have stolen something, no one can find out your address, even though you have not done anything wrong.

The international community needs to come together and establish legal and economic ways for copyright holders to pursue actions against infringing parties. Us nerds need to be part of the decision making process to prevent stupid laws like SOPA and PIP from even being conceived. But to also to provide insight on how to use exiting technologies to facilitate a proper mechanism for content producers to provide access to their property, and to pursue infringers in a way that accurately targets the infringing media, without collateral damage.

What can you do?

  • Sign the Official White House Petition.
  • Contact your congressmen.
  • Educate your less tech savvy friends and family as to why PIP and SOPA will fundamentally break the way humans interact with the internet.
  • Educate yourself, and form your own opinions and solutions to this problem.

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