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*“Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday. I got it Tuesday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.“

– Ted Stevens, Chair, Senate Commerce Committee (June 28, 2006)

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UPDATE: I just checked with the Judiciary Committee website (here) – and it seems the SOPA markup might not be continuing tomorrow (Dec 28) after all. At least it doesn’t appear on their sched.
 
And the reddit SOPA page (here) says “SOPA markup postponed, new date will be posted here when it is announced.” OTOH, if it’s a go tomorrow (Dec 28), then you can watch the markup webcast from the Committee website. We’ll find out in a few hours. Meanwhile, please read on…

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Listen to the clip below, from 2006. Be amazed. Duration is 2:29 min (audio only), excerpted from the notorious 10-minute intervention delivered by Ted Stevens five years ago on what he thought was best for the Internet (i.e. best for the incumbent ISPs). As you listen, keep in mind that as then-chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Stevens was ex officio the chief Congressional lawmaker responsible for oversight of the Internet. (The Commerce Committee encompasses the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet.) Stevens’ diatribe was part of an attempt to block a net neutrality amendment to an omnibus telecomm bill – an amendment intended to prevent broadband providers from giving undue priority to any individual company’s content or services. Hey, where have we heard that one before?

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Did you catch the streaming video “problem”? It’s one of Stevens’ illustrations of the outrageous idea that a company should be allowed to tranmit content to customers online, when the outcome will be to jam up all those tubes; turn the Internet into a massively commercial operation; and prevent other end-users from getting their emails promptly. If you care to listen to the whole thing, I’ve uploaded the MP3 here (1.3 megs, ~10 minutes). The main target is his straw-man version of network neutrality (Stevens died at age 86 in the crash of a private plane in August 2010).

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The Big Cojones Copyright Club escalation plan: let’s just shoot the freaking pirates.

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The new digital divide: Internet-illiterate pols vs the rest of us

I’ve talked a lot on this page about the shortcomings of the CRTC and its political masters in their handling of Internet-related issues. These shortcomings are of several kinds: regulatory capture (the regulator does Bell UBB favors); ideology (consumer welfare gets lip service only); missing empirical evidence (displaced e.g. by self-selected online “consultations”); and poor judgment (economic ITMPs are, like, “transparent”). In any case, what we criticize mostly is the details of provisions as they sit on the page.

But in Washington, we’ve been witnessing a spectacle of a different kind. That would be the recent congressional showdown over “piracy,” brought to us thanks to relentless lobbying by the major studios, music labels and other members of the Big Cojones Copyright Club (Peter Nowak has an interesting comment in his blog on the use of “piracy” and “pirate” in connection with IP).

I think this debate may well mark a change in how pundits react to ill-conceived and potentially harmful Internet policies. Let’s call it The Stevens Syndrome: the mental disorder that afflicts politicians fighting to kill the open Internet based on having no fucking clue how the Internet actually works. 

Congress has of course been embroiled over not one but two bills that would give the US government extravagant and unprecedented powers over the global public Internet. The more controversial of the two – the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA (H.R.3261) – was introduced on October 26, 2011, by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). Over in the Senate, a parallel exercise has been underway involving the PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011, i.e. Bill S.968). The Senate bill was originally introduced on May 12, 2011.

Critics of the bills have come out in droves. They include many of America’s most distinguished Internet founders and pioneers, like Vint Cerf, 83 of whom signed an open letter to Congress last week expressing their concerns (pdf of letter uploaded here):

“If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties’ right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.”

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Who’s going to be losing jobs exactly? Check out the ever-expanding visual online protest at I Work For The Internet…

“We work for the Internet. We know first-hand that the Internet powers the American dream. American innovators have built the world’s most popular sites, selling products and services to every corner of the globe, creating high-paying jobs from Maine to Hawaii. If Congress passes the Stop Online Piracy Act, America’s most promising engine of future jobs and opportunity will be put at risk. Don’t stop us now — we’re just getting started! Tell the world you work for the Internet.”

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All the venting of spleen over threats to the economy (and jobs), threats to free speech and so on has also provoked something very rare for bills-in-progress: the threat of boycotts against organizations that have voiced support for SOPA. That group includes the world’s biggest domain registrar, GoDaddy, which did a sudden 180 on its pro-SOPA stance after thousands of its SOPA-hating customers defected.

But on this round, we’re getting more than attacks on the merits of the proposed legislation. For the first time I can remember, we’re seeing journalists question the legitimacy of any politician who is unashamed, even gleeful, about being an Internet know-nothing.

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“The nightmarish SOPA hearings”

On December 15, Washington Post blogger Alexandra Petri wrote a funny-scary commentary on the SOPA markup proceeding, taking place under the auspices of the House Judiciary Committee. That’s the group chaired by Lamar Smith, author and chief sponsor of the bill. By the way, much though it would be convenient to lay all the SOPA insanity at the Republicans’ doorstep, many Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee also support the bill, including ranking member John Conyers (D-Mich), who’s in tune with the AFL-CIO ad above – SOPA should be passed to protect American jobs.

Petri points out that the Committee heard from the MPAA, but paid no attention to the letter noted above, the one signed by those 83 engineers – many of them responsible for inventing the Internet in the first place. (By mid-November, the Committee had heard from five pro-SOPA lobbies and a single dissenting voice – Google’s policy counsel.)

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A History Lesson
credit: Jack Valenti, 1982
 
Three decades ago, the MPAA, then led by the redoutable Jack Valenti, battled in the courts and before Congress to prevent Sony from shipping a single VCR to the US. The Hollywood studios liked scare-mongering then, as they do now. On April 12, 1982, in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee (yes, that committee), Valenti aired this gruesome analogy: ”I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Ouch. The MPAA lost their case, consoled perhaps by the billions of dollars they made subsequently from the home video market. Big Entertainment has never been great at technology forecasting, even when proponents of new fangled stuff are trying hard to throw money at them. And, like the SOPA proponents today, Valenti rarely let the facts get in the way of his goals as one of the great lobbyists of all time. 

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More SOPA stuff on deck for the next post – including some thoughts about why Canadians should be worried about the soap that is SOPA. Hint: Stephen Harper.

D.E.