Statue of Alexander Hamilton, Washington, DC. Photo by dbking.
This is a sad day for our liberal democratic government with its systems of checks and balances.
My comment on this ecstatic Forbes article (they actually jump the gun on this but that's part of the awfulness):
So there’s a new instrument of executive power called “making a press statement” that trumps congressional bills even before they reach the president for veto? That’s lovely.
And why aren’t we surprised Daryl Issa (R-CA) opposes the bill? His constituents are in Silicon Valley and they think it harms their business model to stop piracy. They don’t care if other people’s businesses are harmed.
It’s not about appeasing the White House. It’s about Google whipsawing inhouse geeks in the Administration with the bully pulpit of the hugely influential tech blogosphere and sites like Reddit and BoingBoing.
It’s not a good thing for representative democracy — which is a lot better than misrule by geeks, believe me — when 80 members are of Congress are on the record as supporting the bill, only 30 have opposed it, and yet “the Internet” — the tyranny of who shows up — can trump the represented millions. This is scary. Direct democracy is not democracy; its Bolshevism.
The collectivization of property has cost the jobs and livelihoods of million in the newspaper, book, movie and related content industries; meanwhile Google and other big platform providers all taken together only provide less than half a million jobs.
Google testified that it had received *a whopping 5 million takedown notices last year of which 75 percent were satisfied and the content removed*. Imagine! They hijack other people’s content and make ad revenue from it and then you have to fight them with lawyers to get your revenue-generating content back under your control. Extraordinary. The other 25 percent probably didn’t have good lawyers. Google’s California Business Model — upload for free and force others to ‘catch me if you can’ — is a great racket but it harms other people’s livelihoods and doesn’t replace them for our whole economy.
Geeks have never adequately explained with all their hype and hysteria how it is that they can block malware sites, and not scream that the Internet is broken if the DNS is blocked, but have such a hard time blocking obvious dedicated piracy sites. They’ve never been able to explain why they have told us for years that you “can’t” encrypt content and “can’t” have DRM, but you “can” have DNSSEC encryption. They are self-serving and non-transparent and unaccountable on these matters.
It’s not about congress needing more “remedial help” from arrogant script kiddies. It’s not about their need for technical expertise when they have plenty of technical experts on board and who have given input. The geeks could use some lessons in reading the law themselves, and understanding what remedies and definitions and defenses are all about before they scream falsely that entire sites can be taken down for one piece of content. That’s just patently untrue.
There’s the context of the rule of law and an independent judiciary that works in complex fashion, not like binary self-executing code, like the geeks imagine it. Law-enforcers would have to make their case; the definitional and remedy tests would have to be made. All of these “free speech” issues have been contrived. Prosecuting piracy sites and illegal drug selling sites is prosecuting crime, not harming free speech. The geeks are deliberately blurring these distinctions in self-interested ways.
Obama has lost my vote over this. I will not be voting for him again. This is sad for me, because I don't see any figure on the right in the Republican Party that I feel comfortable with. Certainly not Ron Paul or Rick Santorum, and I don't really quite understand yet what Mitt Romney stands for. Am I going to be writing in Gorbachev?
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