[liberationtech] [Liberationtech] An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the Senate Judiciary Committee in Opposition to COICA

[Mera Szendro Bok]

source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/open-letter

An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the Senate Judiciary
Committee<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/open-letter>
*Announcement <https://www.eff.org/blog-categories/announcements> by Peter
Eckersley <https://www.eff.org/about/staff/peter-eckersley>* September 28,
2010

Today, 87 prominent Internet engineers sent a joint letter the US Senate
Judiciary Committee, declaring their opposition to the "Combating Online
Infringement and Counterfeits Act" (COICA) <https://www.eff.org/coica>. The
text of the letter is below.

Readers are encouraged to themselves write the Senate Judiciary
Committee<http://action.eff.org/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&id=455>and
ask them to reject this bill.

>  "We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network
> called the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the
> standards and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented
> parts of it. We're just a little proud of the social and economic benefits
> that our project, the Internet, has brought with it.
>
> We are writing to oppose the Committee's proposed new Internet censorship
> and copyright bill. If enacted, this legislation will risk fragmenting the
> Internet's global domain name system (DNS), create an environment of
> tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously
> harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key
> Internet infrastructure. In exchange for this, the bill will introduce
> censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers
> while hampering innocent parties' ability to communicate.
>
> All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended
> to restrict, but this bill will be particularly egregious in that regard
> because it causes entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing
> pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can
> be blacklisted under this bill. These problems will be enough to ensure that
> alternative name-lookup infrastructures will come into widespread use,
> outside the control of US service providers but easily used by American
> citizens. Errors and divergences will appear between these new services and
> the current global DNS, and contradictory addresses will confuse browsers
> and frustrate the people using them. These problems will be widespread and
> will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.
>
> The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open
> Internet, both domestically and abroad. We can't have a free and open
> Internet without a global domain name system that sits above the political
> concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the
> leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly
> uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a
> neutral bastion of free expression. If the US suddenly begins to use its
> central position in the DNS for censorship that advances its political and
> economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.
>
> Senators, we believe the Internet is too important and too valuable to be
> endangered in this way, and implore you to put this bill aside."
>
> *Long list of signatories at source.<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/open-letter>
> *
>
>
>
Mera Szendro Bok

Full time communications coordinator @newmediarights
Media Reformer @sdmediareform
Founder of @commisyourright, supporting communication rights.

My blog: http://communicationisahumanright.wordpress.com/
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