Blacklists
A bill before congress to limit internet access:
COICA creates two blacklists of Internet domain names. Courts could add sites to the first list; the Attorney General would have control over the second. Internet service providers and others (everyone from Comcast to PayPal to Google AdSense) would be required to block any domains on the first list. They would also receive immunity (and presumably the good favor of the government) if they block domains on the second list.
The lists are for sites “dedicated to infringing activity,” but that’s defined very broadly — any domain name where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are “central to the activity of the Internet site” could be blocked.
What could possibly go wrong? Giving the AG and courts the power to determine what websites you can peruse is what they do in Iran and China. Not here.
November 3rd, 2010 at 11:47 am
Completely unconstitutional.
November 3rd, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Give me a few minutes to wrap my head around San Fran banning the Happy Meal before trying to comprehend this lunacy, will ya?!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/02/san-francisco-happy-meal-ban-mcdonalds_n_777939.html
November 3rd, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Nevermind the fact that blocking by domain name is very difficult for an ISP to do – since we see things by IP address, which doesn’t maintain a 1:1 correlation with domain names.
November 3rd, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Government oversight in my /b/?
Oh noes!!1!!!
November 3rd, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Peter, it’s more likely than you think.
November 3rd, 2010 at 3:31 pm
GB: If you look at the actual bill, it simply requires the DNS servers they provide to not return an address for those names.
Blocking by domain name in that context is relatively easy. They’re not required to ban traffic directed to an IP address that matches a DNS name; they’re required to not return DNS results for those names.
It is not, contra most writeups, a “ban on visiting those sites”. The whole point is to make it so that someone looking for Teh Movee Torrentz will have no luck getting to TorrentSiteWhatever.com; that will stop about 95% of users dead in the water, which is the goal.
Anyone who can bother to use a non-US DNS server or look up IP addresses someplace else will have no problem getting around it, but that’s a tiny proportion of people.
Raising the marginal cost of piracy is very effective, in my experience.
(That said, I don’t think it’s a good law, and it’s a waste of time, even if they could really make it work.
But I also don’t think it’s unconstitutional, contra SPQR; it’s viewpoint-neutral, for one, and any analysis of its impact on protected expression is going to have to find that it’s minimal.
And it does seem pretty closely coupled to interstate commerce, for once, since it’s entirely about internet traffic and businesses (those sites are, after all, economic entities making money either from subscriptions or advertising).
Not all bad ideas are unconstitutional, and I don’t see that this one is.
The bill, as written, doesn’t seem to violate the First Amendment, or any of the others.)
November 3rd, 2010 at 5:35 pm
Imagine the possible link between this and the papers that claim that blogs are stealing their content. Whoever appoints the AG gets to silence blogs that disagree with him/her.