The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently before the US Congress, and the related Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, have provoked a lively debate over the possible consequences of regulating the internet. Critics warn that even if the US government accords itself the power to shut down suspicious proxy servers and filesharing sites, this will hardly affect intellectual property theft while likely exerting a global chill on free expression.
At the heart of the debate are proposals that would let the government target ‘foreign infringing sites’ and compel domestic service providers to deny access to foreign domain-names with questionable, or apparently questionable, practices. There are also provisions that would allow individual rights holders to lodge potentially disastrous complaints against websites that did not police their content, including links to content stored elsewhere, with sufficient care. Given the vast amount of user-generated content currently available on the internet – to take one obvious example, dozens of hours of video are uploaded every minute YouTube – this could easily impose impractical if not unattainable standards on some of the most successful internet companies, and discourage further innovation.
Writing in Index on Censorship last November, Cynthia Wong warned that: “The implications of these mechanisms would be profound. SOPA in particular takes direct aim at user-driven, online communications tools — tools like YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Dropbox…. General-purpose social media sites based outside the US could be tagged as ‘foreign infringing sites‘ [and] stripped of financial support… even if they had no bad intent and are used largely for innocent expression.” Wong also points out that “if many other countries adopt these mechanisms, we risk further Balkanisation of the Internet… [a result that] is difficult to square with the US’s stated foreign policy of supporting a single, global network.”
The decentralized, shape-shifting structure of the internet has often placed it at odds with traditional forms of publishing. When films, music and books were still artifacts that had to be bought in real-world stores, the war against counterfeit goods or piracy was relatively straightforward. But reduplication of text, sound and imagery is the very reason that the internet has thrived since its invention, and under its influence books, films and music have themselves morphed into digital entities. While this transition opened up unforeseen opportunities, it also unsettled a wide range of vested interests, particularly those of well-established media houses, Hollywood studios and the like. Their response has been quite predictable: to lobby for tighter regulation, even if this comes at the price of freedom of expression.
This is a familiar pattern. Every disruptive technology in the past century – the telegraph, telephone, movie, radio and television broadcast – faced a similar backlash from the monopolies it sought to displace. In the end most reached some form of accommodation with its predecessors. Television didn’t kill movies or radio, it simply made them evolve in different ways. The incessant competition often taught older media how to play to their strengths. Something similar is underway today, especially since Apple found a way to make sizable profits selling digital books and music. But heavyhanded regulation could easily upset the balance between healthy competition and chaos.
Two seemingly unrelated issues may illustrate the perils of regulating a system that isn’t broken and has, by most measures, exceeded expectations to date. After the financial crisis the mavens of Wall Street strongly opposed government regulation of their own many questionable practices especially oversight of the exotic financial instruments that had been deployed with ruinous consequences. Their arguments mostly prevailed. However, the same government that permitted these excesses is seriously considering closing much smaller loopholes in a system used by hundreds of millions of Americans, and billions of people elsewhere. This relative silence of politicians during this debate is eloquent testimony to the influence of money in US politics.
Another cautionary tale can be found in the US decision to deport record numbers of violent criminals to the Caribbean after the September 11 attacks. Here, too, there were pressing local interests that made the policy seem quite reasonable. But the net result of the deportations was a sharp increase in violence throughout the Caribbean and this resulted in far more insecurity and political instability than US law enforcement could ever have imagined. Copyright infringement and piracy are not violent crimes, but if attempts to discourage them end up forestalling grassroots democracy and human rights movements – like those in the Arab Spring – which, to succeed, require online anonymity and other unregulated freedoms of the internet, then American interests will be no better served.
