What SOPA/PIPA would actually do

We learned this week that our congresspersons still find it politically expedient to claim ignorance of the basic concept of the internet on the grounds that it is something only a "nerd" could understand. They're lying, of course, but there's a good reason why that lie works for them politically.

Mainstream news coverage (meaning big network TV, radio, and major papers) of the SOPA debate has been, until very late in the process, has been practically non-existent. But even when it is covered, it still happens within a vague political frame where little if any attention is paid to informing the audience precisely why the issue even matters in the first place.

And this is particularly striking when one considers just how easy it is to get it right. Take, as the rare example, this Ezra Klein interview with Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. (H/T Michael F.)

Wyden has been this legislation's primary opponent for over a year now. And, who knows, maybe Wyden is actually a "nerd" (we're pretty certain Klein is) but that hardly makes this any less simple.

EK: What makes PIPA and SOPA cluster bombs? If you agree there is a problem, why aren’t these acceptable solutions?

RW: PIPA and SOPA, at their heart, are censorship bills and blacklisting bills, and they undermine much of the architecture of the internet. I recognize that you don’t have discussions about the domain name system at every coffee shop in America. But it’s essentially the directory to the net. If you didn’t have a universal naming system -- for my Senate site, wyden.senate.gov -- it would just be gibberish. What the bills do is say, when you get a court order, you can’t use the domain-name system to resolve to the IP address.

EK; When you say “resolve to the IP address,” exactly what that means. Let’s say I run EzraTube.com. And someone has uploaded copyrighted content to my site. What happens next?

RW: When you type EzraTube.com into your browser, your browser is asking Comcast to ask other servers where that goes. These servers basically act as phonebooks. What the so-called “DNS remedy” in the bill does is enable the attorney general to get a court order that tells Comcast, ‘when people want to find EzraTube.com, don’t send them there. Send them to a Department of Justice site instead.’ People who want to work around this would be able to. There are already third-party tools that use foreign servers or other domain-name servers outside of Comcast’s network. But that’s a problem because, for the last 15 years, we’ve spent all this time building the DNS system into a secure standard. Because of this effort, all of the important work on the net is built around the DNS system. In the national security space, everything we’re trying to do on cybersecurity is built around DNS system.

EK: And so their remedy to piracy is to make it a hassle for me to go to sites that include potentially pirated content, but the side effect is that the remedy corrupts the primacy and impartiality of the DNS system?

RW: Right. Though, by the way, it should be said that over the weekend, Chairman Leahy said he would make changes in the DNS part of the bill. We haven’t seen details of that. If it’s just a directive to “study it” before it goes into law, I would oppose that. So we have questions about that provision. We have questions about the authority the Justice Department has to get a court order to keep a search engine from directing to the site. That’s censorship. We have questions about the definitions applying to information-location tools, which our reading suggests that could apply to almost anything. That makes the legislation too broad.