There is a lot I disagree with here and if everyone on the Internet who opposes SOPA is spouting nonsense about it, their opinions will be easily dismissed. Nothing in this post explains what the mechanisms of SOPA have to do with "eliminating low cost competition." SOPA supporters are quick to point out that SOPA doesn't have anything to do with domestic content hosting sites like YouTube. This is not the problem.
The backers of SOPA want a way to go after foreign websites that violate US laws. Those websites might be legal in their respective countries. So, SOPA's answer is to prevent Americans from accessing them, and to prevent American companies from helping them raise revenue. This is really what the SOPA supports want, and they don't see what the problem is with it. If these sites were in the US, the Department of Justice would shut them down, and although the case of Dajaz1 indicates that more checks and balances are needed, that fundamental fact is not going to change.
Articulating the problem with this does not require elaborate conspiracy theories about the content industries, nor are those conspiracy theories likely to be persuasive to the Congressmen who will ultimately be making a decision on this thing.
There have been different drafts of SOPA with different problematic provisions but I'll focus this post on what I see as the central problem.
In order to prevent Americans from accessing these foreign sites, American ISPs are going to have to buy networking infrastructure that enables them to ban websites. This is going flush a lot of money into the development and refinement of products that provide this capability. These products will become more efficient and sophisticated, and the companies that make them to seek out new markets for them and encourage other governments to require their adoption.
Furthermore, banning American users and American revenue sources from a foreign website that US businesses view as a criminal enterprise will not be the end of these foreign websites. In order to SOPA to really work, these American companies will need to go to other major economies and ask them to adopt laws that are similar to SOPA.
Its worth mentioning that discussions and tests of internet filtering infrastructure are going on in Australia. Infrastructure already exists in the UK. It was originally targeted at child pronography but the blacklist has expanded in 2011 to include sites that violate copyright, so in reality SOPA is already in force in the UK. So you get more countries deploying systems for banning access to websites, and you get more and more money flooding into an industry that designs equipment that does this.
With the cost associated with this equipment going down, and an industry out there marketing these products, they'll find wider uses in more places. More governments will be convinced to pile on the bandwagon. It will become easier and easier to censor content on the Internet.
Just as the types of banned content have expanded in the UK, they will expand in the US - particularly as individual state governments get into the act and start requiring ISPs within their states to ban particular kinds of websites. In the United States the First Amendment will contain the scope of this somewhat, but only through regular court battles with state governments.
The technology that is developed to support SOPA will be used globally and many of the countries that use this technology will use it to suppress dissent and prevent their citizens from accessing international news sources. SOPA contains an anti-circumvention provision that will prevent Americans from developing and distributing tools that people in these countries can use to subvert the filters their governments are putting in place.
Ultimately, SOPA will be a significant step toward an Internet that is a great deal less free than the one we have today - an Internet where anything that people want to censor will be censored, everywhere in the world. An Internet that will not provide a promise of a platform for free thought and communication as it does today.
The content industries don't want this, but it is the obvious and inevitable consequence of the things that they do want. If America wants to stand for a free Internet, it must not adopt a central filtering system. The content industry and our present Secretary of State have argued otherwise, but they are wrong. The fact is that these two things are mutually exclusive.
That is why SOPA must be stopped. Its not about the ends, its about the means. And we need the supports of SOPA to understand this and back down. They are not going to listen to you if you aren't willing to understand where they are really coming from.
