Congress seeks to tame the Internet

Ever since the days of Napster, the recording industry and movie industry have treated the Internet as a place on the map marked “Here be dragons.” For the last decade, Hollywood and big music have spent time not innovating, but trying to get the U.S. Congress to help them tame the Internet.

GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram wrote that the bill gives the government and private companies “unprecedented powers to remove websites on the flimsiest of grounds.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the bill “a dangerous wish list.” The nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington said SOPA would cause “broad collateral damage to freedom of expression and privacy.”

SOPA targets search engines, Internet service providers, ad networks and payment networks precisely because those components are so central to the functioning of the Internet.