New Internet Censorship Law Introduced in U.S. Senate

Senator Patrick Leahy has introduced S.3804 or the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). Although this bill is in the first step in the legislative process, if signed into law, it would allow the attorney general and the Department of Justice to require domain registrars and registries, ISPs, DNS providers, and others to block Internet users from reaching certain websites.

In addition, it would also create a set of Internet blacklists. One would be a list of all of the government-selected Web sites served with a “censorship court order” from the attorney general’s office. The second would be a list of domain names that the Department of Justice determines singularly and subjectively without judicial review that are described as or determined to be "dedicated to infringing activities" — whatever the heck that is. The bill will block domains on both lists, with the latter requesting that service providers do so with legal immunity when they block the sites listed.

This is a censorship bill that could have an extremely dangerous impact on freedom of speech and the Internet. Moreover, it is in contradiction to the tenets of democracy espoused in the Bill of Rights. Last I read, no law shall be made that restricts limits or suppresses speech, meaning that blocking an entire domain over a portion of a single Web site is just dumb.

The Senate needs to seriously reconsider this bill. I would like to believe that the public will make the effort to oppose such idiocy, but the reality is that many do not know and would not know because reading is a lost art and most spend too much time on the Internet following gossip and celebrity than the laws of our great nation and the practices of our politicians.

Are you at all bothered by the government's quiet attempts to infringe upon or do away with our rights? Could you live without Facebook, Twitter or some of the other sites that occupy your time if they happened to make the list?