SOPA Archives | Restoring Liberty

Time to Rise Up Again: United Nations Considering International “SOPA” to Regulate, Tax Internet

October 11, 2012/2 Comments/in Featured, International /by Gary Shapiro

In January, several million Americans contacted Congress to stop passage of two bills that would have destroyed Internet freedom and stifled innovation. The twin bills, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), were meant to counter Internet piracy, a very real problem. But they both used a sledgehammer when a scalpel was necessary. The legislation would have done more than block piracy – they would have hurt Internet users’ ability to get content from their favorite websites and prevented new websites from being created.

The world needs a similar citizen uprising to stop another well-meaning but harmful attack on the ability of Internet users to access websites outside their home countries. A United Nations body, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), will be meeting in December in Dubai to consider at least two proposals which would dramatically affect the ability of Internet users to get the content they want to receive over the Internet.

One proposal would require that a website owner or service provider pay a fee as a “sending party” to the government of any country for the country’s citizens to view the content. This would mean that popular websites like Khan Academy or BBC World would not be available to people outside their native countries unless the website or service provider paid a fee to the user’s country. This would hurt people in developing countries who hunger for access to quality news and education.

The countries that are advocating for this were getting money for international phone calls and have seen that revenue fall off. They see foreign website owners and service providers as having cash to fill the gap in declining long distance telephone revenue. They say they need this money to pay for their broadband infrastructure. But there are other proven ways to encourage quick broadband adoption, including liberalizing market access, encouraging broadband competition, providing spectrum awards and insisting on transparency of ownership of awardees of government telecommunications contracts.

Another proposal up for vote at the ITU meeting would allow governments or some type of multi-government body to use “security” or other justifications to create new rules to regulate the Internet.

Russia joins international effort to limit Internet freedom; pushing bill with similarities to SOPA, China’s firewall

July 11, 2012/2 Comments/in Featured /by Miriam Elder

Two months after Vladimir Putin once again assumed the post of Russian president, the long-feared crackdown on his critics appears to have begun. The internet bill due to be considered by parliament on Wednesday is, say activists, the latest sign of growing repression of civil freedom in Russia.

The bill calls for the creation of a federal website “nolist”. Internet providers and site owners would be forced to shut down any websites on this list. According to Wikipedia authors on Tuesday, the bill will “lead to the creation of a Russian analogue to China’s great firewall”.

The bill’s backers in Putin’s United Russia party argue that the amendments to the country’s information legislation are aimed at child pornography and sites that promote drug use and teen suicide.

But critics, including the Russian-language Wikipedia, say the legislation could be used to boost government censorship over the internet.

In protest, the Russian-language Wikipedia site shut down for 24 hours on Tuesday. The Wikipedia logo was crossed out with a black rectangle, and the words “imagine a world without free knowledge” appeared underneath.

Ron Paul’s New Mission: Internet Freedom

July 6, 2012/1 Comment/in Featured, News /by Alex Moore

For months we’ve been speculating about how Ron Paul might spend the political capital he’s amassed accumulating all those delegate votes through the primary season. Now it looks like we have our answer.

A new document from Ron Paul and his son Rand called “The Technology Revolution” lays out the Pauls’ roadmap for where they’ll focus their agenda moving forward: Internet freedom.

The document makes a case against the largely GOP-motivated legislation to regulate the internet that’s been proposed over the last year—acts like SOPA, PIPA, etc. It also makes a case against the dominant voices resisting internet regulation—the tech companies and political progressives who protested SOPA and who last week released their own manifesto called the Declaration of Internet Freedom.

The Pauls argue that both approaches from the left and the right seek to impose harmful controls on an internet that should be left totally unregulated. In the Pauls’ view, the left’s anti-trust concerns and advocacy for “Net Neutrality,” which would prevent telecoms from divvying up their bandwidth and charging sites for quick load times, are as misguided and anti-free-market as the right’s push for tighter copyright controls with SOPA. Government regulation in the interest of openness and consumer fairness is neither open nor fair, they say.

Instead, the Pauls want to see the internet totally unregulated, with corporations and individuals behaving in the ecosystem however the market will motivate them to.

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