At Web censorship hearing, Congress guns for "pro-pirate" Google
Found on Ars Technica on Wednesday, 16 November 2011
This wasn't a hearing designed to elicit complex thoughts about complex issues of free speech, censorship, and online piracy; despite the objections of the ACLU, dozens of foreign civil rights groups, tech giants like Google and eBay, the Consumer Electronics Association, China scholar Rebecca MacKinnon, hundreds of law professors and lawyers, the hearing was designed to shove the legislation forward and to brand companies who object as siding with "the pirates."
How low was the level of debate? The hearing actually descended to statements like "the First Amendment does not protect stealing goods off trucks" (courtesy of the AFL-CIO's Paul Almeida).
When you let a bunch of retards try to control something they don't even barely understand, then the outcome can only be a huge failure. Luckily, the US is neither the world, not the Internet. Of course SEPA will cause a lot of problems for US companies, but they will move away faster than the politicians think. Not to forget that laws like this only speed up the development of a new layer on top of the current network which is resistant against such forms of censorship.