COICA - The End of Freedom on the Internet

[Zach]

http://podtube.us/coica

It's happening.
There is a new bill working it's way through the unpurged and cystious lower intestine that is our wonderful United States legislature. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) is the name of this particularly terrorizing bill. This bill will allow the USDOJ to interfere with the technically legitimate acts of national registrars if they have registered a domain caught up in illegal acts. They can "nullroute" the domain under this bill - essentially pointing the domain name to a non resolving address.
What next? Well, it does not take a genius to predict a mass exodus of exiled Viagra hawkers and well-meaning torrent trackers to out of country ccTLDs like .co or .cc. Well, here's where this bill really starts to scare the hell out of me. The USDOJ has the power to command Internet Service Providers like Comcast or Verizon to globally block a domain. That's right, folks. Now the government will be able to control precisely what we do or do not see on the supposedly free etherworld known as the Internet.

COICA: http://domainincite.com/docs/CombatingOn...itsAct.pdf

Hell naw. This is AMERICA, DAMNIT. Since when can the government choose what domains I am allowed to visit?

[Vanilla]

It's scary isn't it? Not only is this on it's way, another law known as ACTA (Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) has almost been underway for quite some time nice, and it makes the ISP responsible for it's users actions. This might well seem to be a small steppingstone of what can (perhaps will) happen in the future, laid out by the money-grieving internet industry and it's lawyers. But, in the future, it might very well be misused to censor out stuff such as politics and criminal injustice. Such as blocking sites as wikileaks, and censoring your daily news sites. To show you only what they want you to see.

To some degree, these bills shows clear signs of neo-fascism, wouldn't you agree?

[Matt]

:O I just sh*tted my pants on that last point, Zack. This is a free world, a free country. We do what we wish, and our consequences are only our consience beating us up. This is ridiculous.

[Zach]

Vanilla: The only reason NiftyHost hasn't dropped out of the hosting game so far is the protection extended under the law to ISPs concerning copyright violations and the like.

Matt M: We will be like a stupider China.