[Highman]

Originally Posted by Mentar

Vexx has nailed it pretty well: This is the result of unfettered rampant corporatism, written by lobbyists and funneled to the bought senators and committee members.

I'm as disgusted about it as anyone. However, I'm actually not quite as concerned as the majority seems to be. Why? Because it might actually have beneficial results which are completely unintended by the corporatists: It might finally sting enough to push a still mostly-lethargic public especially in the US into action, and make them aware what's happening here in the holy name of shareholder value.

Let's assume the worst case for a minute (won't happen, just to think about it): The US takes control of the DNS and blanks out all US-centric domains of public torrent sites. Then the people running these sites will migrate to places in the world where US law doesn't apply. One step more, the government controls the US local ISP DNS services to block the resolution of non-US offender domains. Then tips on how to use foreign uncensored DNS servers will circulate in no time. Now big brother gets really nasty and blocks outward traffic on DNS ports, or blocks traffic to offending IP addresses (hello China!). Then people will start using VPN tunnels to external providers to go from there. But with every escalation, more and more people will get really REALLY pissed and wake up.

The point is: There is essentially no chance to really do what they're intending to do, short of tyranny level censorship. And the more they squeeze, the more counteraction they will see. It's a losing battle for them. The culture of free access is pretty much ingrained in internet users nowadays.

Besides: For example, the European parliament has rejected ACTA-like attempts in the past multiple times, and they are extremely critical of those representatives who currently lead the negotiations. Pirate Parties are spawning already, and the more pressure is brought to bear, they will gain votes, which will protect at least those countries which have proportional representation (did I mention already that the US is screwed in so many ways?).

Nah. The worst they can do is pushing people a bit more underground. At the expense of their image.

I thought of something, Congress won't pass it all how much it attained from of the internet. All that I can see that in a few years none of these companies will be obsolete or irrevelent because of not looking forward to see brighter future for them because they wont broaden their advances to technology. Sad but true!