SOPA and Business
SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, is fast coming to a debate on the House floor in the United States amid strong opposition from online privacy and freedom of speech advocates. SOPA has caused some significant rifts between consumers and businesses, businesses and other businesses, and businesses and the government since its introduction to Congress by Representative Lamar Smith. The bill, if signed into law, would essentially give the Attorney General the ability to eliminate Internet piracy and to “protect U.S. customers and prevent U.S. support of infringing sites.” It sounds innocent enough, but could it actually be bad for business?
GoDaddy.com, the Internet’s largest and most successful domain name registrar and hosting company, has already felt the heat from customers who have named December 29th “Leave Godaddy Day” due to the company’s support of SOPA. The main concern goes far beyond the obvious and seemingly good effort to curtail online piracy of all kinds of media, since it allows to government to censor what Americans are able to find on the Internet. Many believe it would open to the door to the same situation the Chinese government has imposed on its people, allowing the Attorney General to prevent access to sites for arbitrary reasons. Businesses like ISPs, search engines, and even private company networks could be held liable for what their users do or attempt to do through those networks. Let’s take a look at just how bad SOPA really is for businesses:
