I’ll keep my liberty

Home Opinion I’ll keep my liberty
I’ll keep my liberty

We barely evaded disaster.

On January 18, internet protests to the SOPA and PIPA bills in Congress changed the internet as we know it. Google slapped a censor bar over its colorful logo.  Facebook and Twitter came out in opposition to the bill. Wikipedia went a step further, denying users access to their English site and only offering a blacked out page with a link to contact their congressman in protest. Over 75,000 websites protested in some way, causing legislators to temporarily drop the bill, running scared as we near elections.

Why the uproar? To put it plainly, the bill’s aimed to delete piracy from the internet.

The bill provisions include court orders requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to certain sites and barring advertising networks and payment facilities from doing business with other sites. Furthermore, search engines would be forced to discontinue linking to sites deemed as breaking the law.

The biggest problem with these bills is that they put the coercive force of government behind the greedy impulses of certain private businesses over others.

The language of the bills is so broad that it gives the government wide jurisdiction to take down sites at will and punish ISPs and search engines for dealing with the infringing sites. They would create a blacklist of sites that could not only include big illegal downloading sites, but also your YouTube channel or personal Facebook page.

Companies would be held responsible for what their users post, making user-generated sites like YouTube nearly impossible to keep running. Search engines would be forced to take down sites from the internet. If you run a site and your blog features one post containing what an entertainment company sees as piracy, you can kiss the site goodbye. If your content is censored, your only hope is to wade through the muddled legal system. Then the company could simply censor more material and you’d be back in the process again. Guilty until proven innocent.

You can only imagine the immense amount of online monitoring that companies will need to undergo in order to seek out pirates. They will essentially spy on your IP address looking for perpetrators. George Orwell couldn’t have thought of a more perfect tyranny.

Worse, this law sets a precedent for other countries. Foreign countries could begin to block U.S. sites as well, countries that are even less concerned with your rights than America. Before long, varying nation’s laws will transform the internet into a totally-policed, global moshpit of regulations.

There is no disputing that piracy is wrong and should be combated, but giving sweeping, tyrannical power to the government is never the way to solve a problem, especially when something as precious as our liberty on the internet is involved. Societies have always undergone their most growth when information was freely shared. That is why, now, with such a tightly knit global community, the world has seen unprecedented advances in technology. Enacting regulations would squelch these advances when they are just beginning, and all for whose benefit? Huge entertainment companies worried about losing a few million dollars because the venders in Bangladesh are selling pirated copies of their latest Blockbuster? No thanks.

I’ll keep my free exchange of ideas. I’ll keep the greatest technological invention in the history of the world. I’ll keep my liberty.