The Hill News

No one disputes or could dispute that the Internet makes crime easier. Theft of intellectual property is one such crime made easier by the Internet. Rights holders are concerned about this, and they should be. 

However, the debate over what we as a society ought to do about online piracy and infringement has gone into the weeds â€" so much so that bills now pending before both houses of the US Congress (S. 936, PIPA; and H.R. 3261, SOPA) seek to compel American Internet Service Providers to alter fundamentally the way their connected customers access the Domain Name System.

This type of mandated filtering is not an American innovation. Strong governments around the world use DNS filtering to signal their displeasure over all kinds of things they don’t like, whether it be untaxed online gambling, or pornography, or political dissent. 

That Congress is now seriously debating doing likewise may represent a sea change in American thinking â€" as tho! ugh we as a people can no longer decide for ourselves what is in our best interests to see or not to see on the Internet, and so we now need our government to help us.

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