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Well today has been dubbed "American Censorship Day".

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An incredible amount of opposition is mounted towards legislation working its way

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through both the House and the Senate to combat copyright infringement on the web.

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Now we've spoken about the PROTECT-IP Act many times on this show,

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but today, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on their version of the bill,

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known as SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act". The PROTECT-IP Act would allow the attorney general

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to create a blacklist of websites that they see as engaging in "infringing activities"

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to be blocked by ISP providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks,

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all without a court hearing or a trial. But SOPA goes even further.

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And numerous groups have come out against both pieces of legislation,

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from civil liberties and free speech groups like the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation,

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various think tanks, a bipartisan group of lawmakers including Ron Paul,

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more than 100 legal scholars, and even tech giants.

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Take a look at this full-page ad taken out in the New York Times today.

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It was taken out by AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga.

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So much opposition, might Congress actually listen?

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Here to discuss it with me is Alexander Howard, the Government 2.0 Washington correspondent

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for O'Reilly Media. Alexander, thanks so much for being here tonight.

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-Nice to be here.

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-OK like I said, our viewers are very familiar with the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA),

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but let's talk about what the differences are between PIPA and SOPA,

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why this is one considered to be so much worse.

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-Well I think one of the ways that people tend to look specifically at is this Private Right of Action

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and you referred to that a little bit, which is to say that someone who has the ownership

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to a given piece of content and feels it is infringing could then go right to the Department of Justice

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and do that in a way that is not necessarily public and then make a complaint against it.

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And then it would give the Department of Justice certain powers to then take that site offline.

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And you talked about a number of them: the idea that you could take it out of search results,

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the way you could constrain it financially, and then, potentially most controversial, which is

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using the Domain Name System to make it so that when people search for the domain of the site,

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they simply couldn't find it.

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-OK, but how about the fact too, that some of these companies, now, if something is posted online

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that might be infringing on copyright, as soon as they're notified, they just take it down.

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But, won't they be held responsible now that they're gonna have to start blocking it,

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censoring it from the very beginning, they'll face legal repercussions if it ever gets up there?

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-Right, I mean the existing infrastructure for this is the DMCA, you do a DMCA takedown.

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If you are a company, you see something of yours up on YouTube for instance, and say you have

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ownership to that, the individual piece of content gets taken down. And that's seen

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some amount of abuse, but it's been a workable system that basically says:

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If you see infringing content on a given site, a given piece, you take that off.

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What this bill has been introduced around is this idea of rogue websites that are outside of the US.

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And Congress, with the urging of a lot of people who have sponsored the bill

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and the people you saw testify today, are interested in finding ways to prevent these rogue websites

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beyond US jurisdiction from being able to host, or link to, pirated content.

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And there are only so many means you can do that.

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The one that I think there's broad consensus around is following the money.

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You know changing the way that you could fund these sites though advertising

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or through payment mechanisms, the same thing in fact that has been used to strangle WikiLeaks.

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But one that's quite controversial in the Internet community is this idea of using

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the Domain Name System (DNS) to do that.

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-Alright, let's in fact talk about the hearing today and who was there. I already mentioned

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the long list of the tech giants, organizations out there, members of Congress

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that are all opposed to the legislation. But the people who are backing it, you have

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the Chamber of Commerce, you have the Motion Picture Association,

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you have a lot of the entertainment industry. How come they, or how come the opposition

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wasn't allowed to speak or voice their concerns today at this hearing?

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-You would have to ask Representative Smith and the heads of the Judicial Council.

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-But did they give no explanation?

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-To my understanding, the Consumer Electronics Association, which is the biggest of its kind,

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asked to testify and did not have the opportunity. If you took a picture of that table of people

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that was there, the only one, from the companies you referenced, the biggest Internet companies

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in the world, was Google. And that representative had a pretty tough time today,

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a lot of tough questions from the Congressmen.

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You didn't see constituencies from the venture capital community, you didn't see

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constituencies from public advocates, from civil right organizations, human rights organizations.

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And, notably, you didn't see anyone from the engineering side. There was actually a specific point,

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where one of the Congressmen raised this issue of whether this bill would be a problem for cyber security.

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And as you know this is a huge issue in Washington, cyber crime has been growing,

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it's a really important issue, [...] on the national stage a strategic bid.

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So when someone brought up this idea that a past council of DHS, Lamar, I'm sorry...

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Lamar Smith was reminded about this, his name was Mr. Baker, that this Domain Name System,

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security was an issue, something that engineers had been working on for a long time.

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-You'd think that this was something that members of Congress would care about as well...

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-They do. And when it was raised, it came up "We should know about that", they asked

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the witnesses about it. And this is called DNSSEC and it is basically trying to

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build in more security to the Domain Name System. Because without it, there are some ways that

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your traffic can be spoofed, which can be a significant issue if you're in parts of the world

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where if your traffic is intercepted, it could be dangerous to you.

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And essentially, something unusual happened: A group of Internet engineers wrote a letter

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to Congress saying, "If you do this, it's gonna break what we've been building."

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Now I don't know if you've hung out with many engineers, they don't usually like to

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insert themselves in politics. But they have. So did a number of venture capitalists,

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including Fred Wilson, including Brad Burnham and Feld, you know these don't get involved usually.

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-So all about it, it seems rather crazy that the Congress wouldn't at least allow them

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to come in and have their piece when they are going through this type of hearing process.

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And so what do you think the chances are that some of this might actually go through,

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either the Senate version or the House version?

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-Well it depends who you talk to. If you talk to Darrell Issa, who is the Chairman on

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Government Oversight, he told The Hill today that he doesn't think it's gonna get very far.

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He thinks that the regulatory burden here is gonna actually be a significant oppositon.

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The security is one important thing. People actually bark (?) at that, right?

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-But do you think, really quickly because we're running out of time, but do you think that

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this also equates us in terms of censorship, we've heard a lot of people say:

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Well, we point fingers at China all the time and here our government would be setting

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a very dangerous precedent, you know for what it looks like around the world.

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-People perked up when the MPAA talked about that a little bit.

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There is a very important op-ed written by Rebecca MacKinnon in the New York TImes today

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and she entitled it "The Great Firewall of America", referring to China's censorship mechanism.

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And this particular principle, this idea that a site should be held liable or not

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for infringing content that's put on to it - The way we've made the Internet over the past

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20 years has protected sites from doing it, it's really what has enabled the Internet

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to grow as much as it has. And the principle is Intermediary Liability.

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That if a site is online, it shouldn't be held liable for user-generated content if someone

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puts something on there. You know it's gonna happen, so what's the mechanism you choose

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to deal with it? If you make it so that the whole site goes down, you know blocked from

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search results, money gets taken away, DNS goes away, then what is that gonna mean for it

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and what is is gonna mean for the risk tolerance of venture capitalists who want to fund

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the start-ups of tomorrow?

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-Yeah, a lot of people asking that question. What is it gonna mean for entrepreneurs, for start-ups,

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for innovation? Well, a lot of people were calling it "the end of the Internet"

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or "the breaking of the Internet". Hopefully they will, you know, come to some common sense

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on this. Alexander, thanks so much for joining us tonight.

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-Thank you for inviting me.