Cleveland Plain Dealer...
Internet censorship? Congress has an app for that: 
Kevin O’Brien  
December 18, 2011 

Saying that Christopher Dodd and the Motion Picture Association of America are a match made in heaven is the kind of thing that would give even heaven a bad name. But you get the idea. 

Dodd acted like a senator for 30 years and got away with it, along the way inflicting on Americans no small number of awful ideas. 

His senatorial going-away present to us was Dodd-Frank, formally known as the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a massive compliance nightmare that stands forbiddingly athwart hopes for economic recovery. People with capital see no sense flashing the bankroll until the new rules of the financial game settle down, and that could take awhile. 

Having done all that he could to mess up the economy, Dodd left the Senate for a new sinecure as chairman (read: chief lobbyist) of the MPAA. In that role, he’s trying to wheedle a bill out of Congress that would put the Internet all the way under the federal government’s thumb. 

The stated purpose is to protect Hollywood’s wares and other intellectual property from Internet piracy, which might be a good idea if it weren’t so ham-handedly designed. The people in the movie business are entitled to every penny of profit they can make, stealing from them ought to be a crime and technological impediments to thieves are well worth exploring. 

schmidt.jpgJohn Doman, The St. Paul Pioneer Press/Associated PressGoogle Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has been an outspoken opponent of SOPA and PIPA. 

But as so often happens when Big Business -- in this case, Hollywood and the Recording Industry Association of America -- runs to Big Government for protection, over kill is always just around the corner. That’s the sad tale of Dodd-Frank, which is all about special government treatment for the too big to fail, and it’s just as true with what Dodd and some of his old congressional chums want to do to the Information Age. 

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and its Senate companion, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), are overkill writ large. 

They’re the script for a sequel to what has happened to the free flow of Internet information in China -- a place where plugging “freedom” into an Internet search window will get you nothing but a black mark in a government database. 

SOPA and PIPA would give federal authorities the power to order Internet service providers to shut down sites believed to have violated copyright laws and could make search engines -- Yahoo or Google, for example -- stop websites’ links from appearing in search results. 

The effect, critics say, would be to put the government in control of Internet service providers and search engines whenever it decides it wants to be. 

Harvard law professor and First Amendment expert Laurence Tribe takes the repeatedly unconstitutional SOPA bill apart, section by section, in a well-researched, well-reasoned slam dunk. 

Not the least of Tribe’s problems with the bill is a hair-trigger enforcement mechanism that “would give complaining parties the power to stop online advertisers and credit card processors from doing business with a website, merely by filing a unilateral notice accusing the site of being ‘dedicated to theft of U.S. property’ -- even if no court has actually found any infringement.” 

Americans don’t need to sacrifice the free flow of information to solve Chris Dodd’s piracy problem. One better idea already on Congress’ table is the Online Enforcement and Protection of Digital Trade Act, offered by Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa as a direct challenge to SOPA and PIPA. 

No market should be freer than the one in which ideas are exchanged. But governments don’t always see it that way, and putting government in a position to big-foot anything it doesn’t like on the Internet would be an awful mistake. If you think it “couldn’t happen here,” you’re far too trusting. 

There was a time when Dodd seemed to recognize such dangers. When he was still a senator, he advised the execs at Google, “Tell the Chinese government that Google.cn will no longer censor information with Google’s consent.” 

Here’s what he says now: 

“When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites.” 

In 30 years as a senator, Chris Dodd wasn’t right often. But credit where it’s due: On Internet censorship, he definitely was right the first time. 

Read this and other columns at the Cleveland Plain Dealer