Authoritarianism on the march

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents cannot catch the illegal aliens who work at the McDonald's where they eat lunch in Washington, DC, but they can shut down websites.

U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More

This is just a taste of what's to come if the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act passes Congress.

The COICA Internet Censorship and Copyright Bill

The main mechanism of the bill is to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS), which translates names like "www.eff.org" or "www.nytimes.com" into the IP addresses that computers use to communicate. The bill creates a blacklist of censored domains; the Attorney General can ask a court to place any website on the blacklist if infringement is "central" to the purpose of the site.

If this bill passes, the list of targets could conceivably include hosting websites such as Dropbox, MediaFire and Rapidshare; MP3 blogs and mashup/remix music sites like SoundCloud, MashupTown and Hype Machine ; and sites that discuss and make the controversial political and intellectual case for piracy, like pirate-party.us, p2pnet, InfoAnarchy, Slyck and ZeroPaid . Indeed, had this bill been passed five or ten years ago, YouTube might not exist today. In other words, the collateral damage from this legislation would be enormous.

Authoritarianism is predicted to rise during declining social mood. However, since the Internet is global, the U.S. actions have global repercussions. For instance, whereas China blocks Chinese users from a site such as Facebook, the U.S. action would take down the site everywhere because the U.S. controls DNS. There are lots of problems with COICA, but the main one is that it would destroy the Internet itself as a free flowing exchange of information. Since the U.S. is a leader in technology and this is one of the few areas of exports, it seems crazy, but there it is.

"Bear markets of sufficient size appear to bring about a desire to slaughter groups of successful people. In 1793-1794, radical Frenchmen guillotined countless members of high society. In the 1930s, Stalin slaughtered Ukrainians. In the 1940s, Nazis slaughtered Jews. In the 1970s, Communists in Cambodia and China slaughtered the affluent. In 1998, after their country's financial collapse, Indonesians went on a rampage and slaughtered Chinese merchants."
-- Bob Prechter, Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior, p. 270