H.R.3261 -- Stop Online Piracy Act
“To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.”
Standing on the cliff of a vast horizon that overlooks the future of the Internet, I can only find myself wondering of how things will evolve and how we’ll all look back in 30 years to the Internet and web community of today. How will the future Internet be held up in comparison to today?
The Web has expanded to include a vast array of services that perform at a level I don’t think anyone could have fully anticipated 20, maybe even as early as 10 years ago. Web-based Video, Music, Applications, and Social Media have taken over and infiltrated multiple aspects of peoples daily lives in predictable and totally unexpected ways. Grandparents and completely unsavvy tech-folks have escaped into the complex facet of Social Networking, Youtube How-to videos, and Web blogging. In-fact newborn children of today may even have their own Facebook page and their entire lives will be documented on a website and archived. From birth until death in Facebook status updates.
Not only has the variety of options increased on the Internet, but their quality, the ease-of-use, and the speed have reached levels that have made it nearly accessible for everyone, to at least some degree. Yet we find ourselves at a crossroads as we see data throttling, tiered bandwidth plans, a narrowing market of potential competition, and attempts to firewall, block, and/or impose gov’t sanctioned censorship on ‘certain’ material.
Lately this conversation or battle, has taken some more focused media attention because of the recent bill Stop Online Piracy Act(H.R.3261; SOPA) - which has drawn a lot of heat due to the nature and extent in which it proposes Internet regulation. This new regulatory bill takes it to the point where Internet Service Providers(ISPs) could be forced to prevent access to certain websites using deep packet inspection. Basically this is used to stop access to certain sites that operate outside the legal jurisdiction of the United States government.
While it’s all very controversial, this isn’t the first of such bills - it’s just the one with the most enforcement behind it so far. Earlier this year the Protect IP Act(S.968) was a similar bill with a little less force that had attempted to pass in legislature, however Senator Ron Wyden was able to put a stop on the bill and essentially killed it. Before the Protect IP Act, there was the COICA(S.3804) or Internet ‘Black-list’ bill back in September of 2010 - which Senator Ron Wyden also put a block on to kill.
There’s a list of around 354 different organizations and companies for the SOPA bill that are in support of it, or a bill in its likeness. Some of the companies include Sony, Nintendo of America, Universal, Warner Music Group, The Walt Disney Company, and many many more. The point is, this isn’t the first, and even if it is stopped by the likes of good-minded Senators like Ron Wyden; there will be more bills like this. It almost seems inevitable that some form of further regulation will arrive at this point.
As times change, as they inevitability do, we may find ourselves looking at a very different Web. A Internet where you pay your ISP for a “Google” package, that lets you use the Google search engine, Gmail, and other Google products with prioritized speed over lesser known, or smaller websites. Or a “Media” package, that gets you access to all the “cool” sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Netflix.
Besides tiered speeds, many ISPs already impose bandwidth limits where your speeds become throttled. In some extreme cases, you’re even charged more per m/b overages; much like Wireless providers. “Honey, can you make sure to upgrade us to the 100gig per Month Internet package?” - This becomes even more important as more and more content goes digital, such as Television, Movies, and Gaming. If physical discs; like buying a physical copy of a game or movie becomes more outdated, consumers are going to need more and more bandwidth to download all their media.
Or perhaps we’ll just have a great Firewall, ie; China, were most, if not all ‘non-sanctioned’ content is blocked and your website has to go through a Government Agency like the MPAA to get ‘approval’ for your website before it can be posted. May we one day say goodbye to the days of personalized blogs?
Of course, one may say there are ways to avoid thigns like this. Between VPN, back-end networks like TOR or other Proxies, it’ll be possible to avoid Firewalls and the like. While this may be true, it will not apply to the mass of general/non-super technological users. I hope that it doesn’t come down to a battle like this, but it certainly seems plausible. If nothing else, we need to at least be aware that the fundamental way the Internet is used by millions of people today is under threat in certain ways, and that is undeniable.
All of this thinking leaves me on a slightly more Sci-Fi horizon, in a much more distant future. I wonder of an advanced Human Civilization, or even some distant Alien Archaeologists searching a future Earth and digging through an old computer server on the Northwest coast of the United States and coming across a huge data archive of millions and millions of peoples stored Social Networking site profiles, updates, and pictures... With them only scratching their head, as they attempt to understand the mundane complexity of the 21st century Internet.
[Source(s): SOPA Breakdown, Letter from Supporters of IP Protection, the SOPA Bill, Some Info on Ron Wyden, COICA Info, Protect IP Act Info, SOPA Info, Pro IP Act. Protect IP Act]
