Resist US attempts to police Internet globally

The Internet used to be a fun place. I grew up with it through the late 1990s when static websites were still exciting and computer teachers believed that their students should learn some programming skills.

Because its pioneers were far more interested in sharing and knowledge than profit, it developed as a wonderfully unconstrained virtual territory where information roamed freely.

Not so much these days, even if the conservatives would have you believe it is all pornography and leftist revolutionaries. Although they are right about the porn, the rest of the Internet isn’t nearly as interesting as it was before anyone thought about how to make it commercially viable.

Still, as social spaces go, it is much more democratic than most, especially because it is so easy to ignore the rabid conservatives and profiteers online.

All that could end this year: The American government is sneaking up on the Internet under the cover of a law that would allow them to police it quite effectively.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was announced in the US House of Representatives in October 2011 and it was due to be discussed this month, but it has been postponed until February because the Republicans and Democrats are busy preparing for the coming election.

All this I can state with some confidence because of Wikipedia, the English world’s online reference God, which went black all of Wednesday to protest against this Bill.

SOPA is designed to protect American business interests by invoking intellectual property rights and using legal mechanisms that will reach far beyond US borders. Basically, creatives in business and entertainment and science are apparently tired of having their products stolen by scurrilous foreign pirates because this means a lot less revenue for them.

To prevent this industry-killing haemorrhage of films, faux Chanel handbags, generic drugs and plagiarised articles, SOPA would allow America to track down sites outside of the US that are “dedicated” to piracy and effectively kill them... legally.

The protests against this Bill are coming from all kinds of quarters, but the most visible lobby is that of online businesses that thrive on the sharing of information as freely and as cheaply as possible.

This obviously includes social media as well as a whole slew of other Internet initiatives, businesses, protests, political activists, social commentators etc. Passing SOPA will essentially grant the US government powers to censor the Internet globally.

If that doesn’t fill you with horror, you are probably a Hollywood exec on vacation in East Africa.

We are into our counterfeits and pirate DVDs in a very major way, for the simplest of reasons: Because they are available at prices that we can afford. American cultural products are very expensive even if you actually make American money.

They are entirely out of the reach of the adoring non-American masses who keep Hollywood tartlets afloat in a soup of money and foreign-born adopted children. If SOPA passes, the consequences for Tanzanians could be more complicated than the closing of one or two video stores.

It might just rearrange a few things for the nascent local online community, possibly with consequences for free speech.