For the federal government, regulating the Internet has always been a “swing and a miss.” One of the few successful laws to date has been the Children’s Online Protection Act, which regards the access to offensive content on the Internet on school and library computers (http://www.fcc.gov/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act) and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that relates to the following bills I will be talking about in this post. But most of the legislation put into place has caused uproar amongst Internet users.
The Internet is a black hole of endless information. How and can it be controlled? As far as the government’s concerned, they’ll do anything to try.
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) were recent pieces of legislation presented to Congress that caused immediate action from many subscribers and mainstream online organizations. Both bills pinpoint copyright infringement and piracy on the Internet by foreign websites. Websites, such as Wikipedia and Tumblr, initiated blackouts for awareness and protest of these bills. These blackouts were effective in killing the legislation. Both were exhausted.
The government’s attempts to regulate the Internet have not been completely effective, in my opinion, because of the following reasons: 1) The Internet covers every corner of the globe. 2) The Internet contains infinite sources. It will be interesting to see what the fed’s next move will be as Internet users becomes more of a watchdog.
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