The EFF writes:

As you may or may not be aware, there is an extremely bad Internet censorship
bill that is going to be passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee this Wednesday. Senators are claiming that they haven't heard any opposition to this "COICA" bill, and it is being sponsored by 14 of the 19 committee members.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has some heavy guns - having this bill come up this way means there is a serious possibility of passage.

The EFF further writes:

The bill creates two blacklists of censored domains. The first is longer, and includes any sites where the DOJ decides that infringement is "central" to the purpose of the site. The bill gives ISPs and registrars strong legal incentives to censor the domains on that list. The Attorney General can also ask a court to put sites on a second, shorter blacklist; ISPs and registrars are required by law to censor those sites.

The bill provides that the Attorney General can get a court order forcing domain name registrars or registries to pull a particular domain. It also provides that if they don't want to go through that process, they can publish the domain name in a list. DNS registries are strongly encouraged to go ahead and pull any domain on that list if they want to avoid being held legally liable for the content on that domain.

Because DNS registries are implicated, and not just registrars, this could have significant and extremely destructive implications for US control over the DNS systems. This is really very bad.