Oh to be fly on the wall at that banquet.

Founder and chief executive of Stack Exchange, Joel Spolsky, with some sensible reflections post PIPA and SOPA. This is starting to feel too cogent and organised for the internet:

The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us... then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, "OK, compromise," and gets half of what they want. That's not the way to win... that's the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online.

The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws.

A long read, but worth chewing over in full:

"These measures won't put an end to online piracy; to do so, you would need a 'Net so architected around control and authentication that it would hardly resemble the 'Net we have today. Can a plan on the lines proposed cause the jolly pirates running The Pirate Bay to scuttle their boat? Possibly not. Will it provide a simple way to take down specific live streams of sporting events in real time? No."

Top Google lawyer David Drummond:

Fighting online piracy is extremely important. We are investing a lot of time and money in that fight. Last year alone we acted on copyright takedown notices for more than 5 million webpages and invested more than $60 million in the fight against ads appearing on bad sites. And we think there is more that can be done here—like targeted and focused steps to cut off the money supply to foreign pirate sites. If you cut off the money flow, you cut the incentive to steal.

"In the entire discussion, I've seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There's no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?"

"According to TheDomains, 21,054 domains were transferred away from Go Daddy on Friday alone. At $6.99 a pop, that would make for a loss of $147,167, not taking future renewals into account. The day before wasn’t a good one for the company either, with 15,000 people taking their domains elsewhere. That means that even though Go Daddy changed its stance, people have had enough."

Easier than lobbying politicians, of course, to move a domain. But doesn't really get to the root of the problem.

If you wondered what self-inflicted idiocy looks like, here it is. Then again, these are the politicians who brought you the ineffective CAN-SPAM Act, which was meant to kill off spam, but didn't. We can only hope that if this act passes it's just as ineffectual.