Stop The Censorship - SOPA = CRAPA!

If you haven't heard of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) - then listen up, people!
It's basically a bill (you can read it for yourself here) that allows any intellectual property holder to shut down any website's online advertising and block credit card payments - all without the need for that whole "due process of law" thingie getting in the way.

It works sort of like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) "takedown notices". You know - the ones where someone can claim copyright on a YouTube video and they pull it?

In this case, if this thing passes (and it looks like it very well might), the people who own the intellectual property only have to file some "specific facts" (yeah, really - that's what it says) to back up their claim that a site stole their property - and the payment and ad networks have five days to cutoff all contact with the accused site.

Well at least they can't take the site down completely... right?

Right!

BUT - they don't have to - because then the US Federal Government will have the right to file an injunction against any site with a hearing with a judge. If it gets the injunction, the US Government has the right to block all US access to said site - at the DNS level!

It also means that search engines have to be careful - because they could get into trouble because they have the duty to prevent the site in question "from being served as a direct hypertext link."

Let's not forget all the ad networks and payment processors that also have a duty to cut the site off.

Oh yeah, and there's one more thing: Internet service providers and payment processors can simply block access to sites based solely on the belief that the site(s) are "dedicated to the theft of US property". Oh, and the ISPs and payment folks can't be sued, either.

Nice.

Listen, I'm no fan of priracy in any form - whether the intellectual property owner is American or not. It is a big problem. It is a legitimate problem. However, censorship legislation is NOT the answer. There are definitely "rogue" sites out there that are making money from what amounts to "stolen [IP] goods". Fine, go after them. Shut them down.

It's bad enough that ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement) can seize domains at will and have, in fact, wrongly shut down 84,000 subdomains of mooo.com just last year.

One can only imagine the chaos and confusion, incorrect claims of ownership, cost, complexity, and general cluster this bill would cause.



SOURCE

ICANN (andSoCanYou.com)

Well, the governing body for Internet top level domains (also called TLD's) like .com, .org, etc. took a historic vote yesterday that will allow anyone with $185,000 (and $25,000 annually after that) come up with their own TLD.

I think ICANN

Seems the folks over at ICANN have decided that the "holy" top level domain (TLD) business is more about money than control. They've recently come up with the idea that along with the "blessed" TLD's of .com, .net., .org, .biz that they would just open up the flood gates (for a price!) and let anyone with cash make up their own TLD.

Talk about your wild west!

Basically their proposal is that rather than people just buying an existing TLD domain for the price of a latte, anyone with $100,000 (or more - final price TBD) - can just make up any TLD and basically "own" that extension.

Think about that. The obvious ones are .sex, .money, .bank, .tech, etc. - but that will have a huge impact on both the marketplace as well as the average consumer.

For example - what if Marriott scores the .hotel domain? Will they preclude Hilton and Sheraton from buying a domain name that ends in .hotel? How about all the speculators that in the early days of the bubble were buying up every single domain (and misspelled variant) that could potentially have any value. They'll do the same for the other TLDs as well.

What about companies with trademarks and intellectual property marks - they will now have to police dozens of TLDs for violations and go after them one by one.

Last but not least - what about the end users? Talk about confusion! Most people have a hard time trying to remember mybank.com. Now if you throw in all the other possible TLDs - it could be mybank.money, or mybank.bank, or mybank.cash, or mybank.cool, or mybank.weTreatYouRight, etc.

Now at least there's only a few possible variations - with the default .com being the top-of-mind domain - even for organizations that are not companies. I mean, really, when's the last time you visited a commerical company that ended in .net? How about .biz?

It says something about an organization if they don't have a .com address. It says "We woke up too late on this whole 'Internet Thing' and could only get a crappy .net or .biz domain."

However, with a proliferation of TLD's - I think it will become even more valuable to have a .com (or .net or .biz) email - unless a few TLD's raise to the top of customer awareness through advertising and marketing.

Even then, breaking the .com habit won't go easily - and there is bound to be ample opportunity for good guys and bad guys alike to flourish in a free-for-all (well, a $100,000-for-all) type of unregulated (except by ability to pay) environment. The bad guys are already have a field day with phising sites and Trojans and stuff. It would be easy for them to create all kinds of domains on all kinds of TLD's and then just keep them rotating all the time.

All-in-all, I just don't see who wins with this type of arrangement.

Oh, wait, now I get it - ICANN.