So I've had the C-SPAN3 stream open in one tab and Twitter open in the other since about 10am this morning, watching the House Judiciary Committee mark up SOPA, and I need to write some of this down before my head explodes.
For anyone who's been ignoring this (lucky you): SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act, and today the committee is going through it line by line, debating amendments, the whole legislative sausage-grinder thing. Lamar Smith is the chairman and the bill's main sponsor, so you can guess how neutral he's being about the whole process.
11:20am - Zoe Lofgren just tried to get an amendment through about the DNS blocking provisions and got shot down. This is the part of the bill that actually worries me the most, technically speaking. The idea that you'd force ISPs to mess with DNS resolution to block sites accused of piracy is just a bad idea on a plumbing level, not even getting into the free speech stuff. Half the internet security people I follow on Twitter have spent the last two weeks explaining why this breaks DNSSEC, and it doesn't seem to have landed with anybody in that room.
12:05pm - Lunch break. My Kindle Fire is sitting next to my laptop because I've been trying to read a PDF of the actual bill text on it between segments and honestly the browser on this thing is not built for that. $199 is a steal for what it does, but let's not pretend it's a great tablet for reading legislation. Anyway.
1:40pm - Back from break and Jared Polis is now the one pushing back hardest, which is kind of funny because he's one of the only people in that room who actually built internet companies before running for office. He keeps asking pretty basic technical questions and getting non-answers. There was a moment where someone on the committee admitted, more or less, that they didn't understand how DNS works, and just... okay. That's the bill you're marking up right now.
2:15pm - Somebody just made a joke about not being a "nerd" as a reason for not fully grasping the technical objections, like that's a defense and not the actual problem. I get that these are lawmakers, not engineers, that's fine, that's what witnesses and hearings are for. Except this hearing didn't really call technical witnesses. It's just members of Congress talking to other members of Congress about how the internet works. It's a little bit like watching people debate plumbing code without a plumber in the room.
3:30pm - The Carrier IQ stuff from a couple weeks back keeps popping into my head watching this, honestly. Different issue, obviously, that's about a hidden logging tool that ended up on a ridiculous number of phones without people really knowing it was there. But it's the same general theme: the people building and using this stuff understand it a lot better than the people regulating it, and that gap keeps showing up in stupid, avoidable ways.
4:50pm - It sounds like they're not going to finish today. There are apparently something like 20-something amendments still sitting on the table, and the committee is going to pick this back up tomorrow. So this is a two-day thing, at least. Great, more of my afternoon lost to a livestream tomorrow too.
A few scattered thoughts before I close the laptop:
The engagement on this from actual tech companies has been kind of slow until the last week or so, and now everybody's lighting up about it, which, fine, better late than never I guess. I saw a few statements floating around from people at larger web companies today basically saying this bill as written would force them into an impossible compliance position. That tracks with what I'd expect.
Also, watching a congressional hearing on a laptop while also trying to keep half an eye on Ice Cream Sandwich rolling out to my Galaxy Nexus in the background is a very 2011 way to spend a Thursday. The update, by the way, is great so far. Wish I could say the same about the hearing.
I'll probably write more once they wrap this up tomorrow, assuming they actually wrap it up tomorrow. Wouldn't put money on it.