The public is not misinformed about these bills. The people who are protesting these bills have a historically unprecedented level of access to both the full text of the bills as well as reams detailed analysis. It is probably the case that no public protest over a federal bill has ever been this well informed.
I know its comforting to tell yourself that, and SOPA supporters have been doing it a lot recently. If you think that everyone who is opposed to what you are doing is misinformed, you don't really need to think about what they are saying. You can just write them off, and if you say it enough maybe other people will write them off too.
These bills require ISPs to create an infrastructure in the Internet that allows them to prevent Americans from accessing any website on an official government blacklist. Once that blacklist mechanism is in place, there will be a rush to add new categories of sites to it. Every group in this country with a censorship agenda is going to jump on the bandwagon. Legislatures at all levels will get into the game.
The American people do not trust their government to operate an official blacklist of banned websites, and the american people have a pretty good understand of the litany of unintended consequences that such a naive enforcement mechanism would have.
If you've got a personal financial interest in doing something, you can easily allow your desires to delude you into ignoring its greater consequences. Thats why we have a democracy. Its a check upon the institutional blindness of factional interests.
The IP Interests need to stop fooling yourselves, and start listening. You don't know as much as you think you do about the thing you are trying to control.
