Just remember to add "in the United States" to the end of each dire prediction. Try it:
SOPA will cause rampant censorship of the internet... in the United States.
I am a US citizen, currently living in the US, and I hate this, but even so, it makes me feel better to remember that there's a big, big world outside our borders. If the US flies off the rails on this, I fully expect the rest of the world to shrug and move on. The internet and the Americans have been closely intertwined since the beginning but I don't expect it will always be that way. The America that created the internet is more or less gone now. Its time for the rest of the world to step up.
The UK, France and Germany will follow suit within a few months. I'm German and I'm absolutely certain our politicians and lobbyists are already working on their own version SOPA which they'll introduce as soon as the US is done. You guys need to understand that you're the Western precedence society. Whatever you do, we'll copy it, especially if it's something authoritarian (which is kind of "our thing" here in Europe anyway).
Another problem is that it doesn't matter how many times a SOPA-like law is stopped in time. It will simply return as many times as needed until it finally passes. And once legislation passes, it becomes immortal.
I wish I could wave a big flag and yell "don't follow us! we're as lost as you are". To top it all off, we've not exactly been doing an exemplary job of finding our own way of late.
Not really. Great idiotic laws have been repealed, even US Constitutional amendments. Slavery, prohibition, etc. Not before lots of pain and bloodshed, though.
But consider -- organizations like Wikipedia are located in the USA, precisely because of the broad protections of freedom of speech. In fact, there are few other places in the world where Wikipedia could have been founded before being sued out of existence, absorbed into the government, or thrown off the internet entirely and its founders jailed for life.
Even now, I don't think there are any other countries who are willing to plant their flag on free speech, in the uncompromising way the framers of the US Constitution intended. In the UK, they still tilt libel laws heavily in favor of public figures, and are even willing to prosecute crimes like "glorification of terrorism". In my country, Canada, we have a great tradition of freedom of speech, but in practice we're willing to dispose of it when it's good politics. And even other Western countries one thinks of as bastions of tolerance still have blasphemy laws.
So if the USA goes down, I'm not sure what other society is ready to step up. Iceland?
Didn't Iceland recently pass some exceptionally strong media protection and free speech legislation? I believe Wikileaks helped substantially in the development of the law
They won't stop at US borders. They'll just use it as an argument in other countries. Eventually the Congress would be convinced to pass laws to punish foreign nationals -- deny visas, seize domains on US DNS servers and so on.
I can't think of a better way to erode Americas international influence. If you can't go there and your web sites can't be viewed there, and they won't let you watch any of their popular media, or even import your products for sale there, what the hell good are they to anyone?
I expect the makers of SOPA et al think they're dictating terms to the world. I think will turn out to be just isolationism in disguise.
If SOPA's passed, what kind of example would the United States set for the rest of the world, especially after all our criticism of China's internet censorship?
A terrible one. So bad, I hope, that the rest of the world says to themselves "those Americans and Chinese are all nuts! We shouldn't trust them with too much of the internet's infrastructure."
What is law in the USA, becomes law all over the world through the state department stick and carrot, especially when the organizations pushing the law in the USA have an international interest for it to become law in the rest of the world.
Australia gets what you guys get, such as our own version of the DMCA thanks to the wonderful Free Trade Agreement we have with your government.
Outside of agreements, America gets held up as the example to emulate. If something passes in the US, it becomes that much harder to fight the spread to our own countries.
SOPA will cause rampant censorship of the internet... in the United States.
I am a US citizen, currently living in the US, and I hate this, but even so, it makes me feel better to remember that there's a big, big world outside our borders. If the US flies off the rails on this, I fully expect the rest of the world to shrug and move on. The internet and the Americans have been closely intertwined since the beginning but I don't expect it will always be that way. The America that created the internet is more or less gone now. Its time for the rest of the world to step up.